Betrayal In The Kite Runner

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Emotional Deceit and Changed Minds
Betrayal is probably the most devastating loss someone can experience. To get betrayed, one has to place their trust on someone else and it hurts considerable when the person they trusted put their self-interests first and tore their trust. It not only breaks people’s hearts but also their trust. Betrayals also have unintended effects because everyone reacts with different levels of emotion when someone they trusted and loved broke their implicit trust of always being there for them. It also changes the deceiver because guilt drives them to change in order to redeem themselves. In Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, there are many betrayals found in the book and it affects the characters differently. …show more content…

Betrayals can cause someone to hate oneself. Whether the wrongdoer realizes his misdeed or not, a betrayal will always have consequences, no matter the intentions. For example breaking someone’s trust can deteriorate relationship. This fact is proven in both the Kite Runner and Alex Lickerman’s article, “Redemption.” After betraying their friends, both Amir and Alex lost their friends. Some people become the victims of their own mind because their mind is constantly reminding them of what they did. People who experience this will try to escape from this by pushing away people that remind them of their mistakes. Like for example Amir pushes Hassan away because he did not want to be reminded constantly of his betrayal: “I want you to stop harassing me. I want you to go away!”(Hosseini 88). Hassan reminds Amir of what he did and since Amir doesn’t want to face them, he tries to make Hassan leave. Carrying around burdens of things that someone isn’t proud of, like actions that harmed others, make them lose faith in goodness and self-esteem (Lickerman 2). Betrayal causes inner agitation because you feel guilty and which makes you lose faith in oneself. The only way to decrease this mental battle is by focusing on positive things and trying to do good things. This helps because it is a way of balancing the bad deeds with the good deeds which make people feel better and cause changes in their behavior. Amir’s betrayal changed him because he is not a selfish person anymore. His relentless guilt causes him to be kinder and selfless; He planted a “fistful of crumpled money under the mattress” when he realized that Wahid, an Afghanistan whose house Amir stayed in, didn’t have food for his family (242). Alex Lickerman wrote that one path to redeeming oneself is to “aim to improve [themselves]” which is what Amir did by growing out of his selfishness (3).

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