How Is Jalil Presented In A Thousand Splendid Suns

Serial killers may become who they are due to the fact that they may not have the emotional capacity to understand that what they are doing is hurtful and cruel; they may lack the emotional capacity to really feel any emotions at all. Characters in a novel can behave in a similar way, but they may not commit a wrong doing such as murder. In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, the relationships with family members (wives and children, respectively) are greatly different between Jalil and Rasheed. Each character demonstrates varying capacities for emotion; Jalil is very empathetic and apologetic whereas Rasheed is inconsiderate and belittling. Jalil is very insensitive of Mariam’s feelings in the beginning of the novel, but this changes over

Although Jalil was embarrassed of her, he is very apologetic for the way that he treated Mariam later in the novel. He wrote a letter to Mariam before he died in which he said:

You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret...When it comes to you, Mariam jo, I have oceans of it. [Was it because I had a] fear of losing face? Of staining my so-called good name? How little those things matter to me now...But now, of course, it is too late...Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariam jo...that I never deserved you...[and] all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariam jo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me. (359)

Jalil explains how he recognizes that Mariam has always been a good daughter, and he is extremely ashamed of the way that he treated her during her childhood. He thinks that maybe this is his punishment for being heartless, prideful, and a bit of a

Rasheed always says that a women’s face is her husband’s business only. However, he owns pornographic magazines. Mariam is shocked by this fact at first, but then realizes that she cannot fault him for being the way that God made him. “Surely the women on these pages had husbands, some of them must... If so, why did Rasheed insist that she cover then he thought nothing of looking at the private areas of other men's wives and sisters?... His needs differed from hers... Could she fault him for being the way God had created him?” (75) Jalil does not own pornographic magazines (that we know of) but he is a hypocrite in other ways; he was ashamed of Mariam because she was a harami, but it is his own fault that she was conceived. Nana, Mariam’s mother, told Mariam that Jalil had told his wives that Nana had forced herself onto him, but the reader has no proof that this statement is true. "You know what he told his wives by way of defense? That I forced myself on him. That it was my fault” (6). Nana thinks that Jalil is a “rich man telling rich lies” (5) and a fraud because of