A Thousand Splendid Suns Setting Essay

It’s known that in some areas of the world, girls as young as 14 years old can get a child. This fact, although it’s disturbing, can become meaningful according to the setting of a story. The locations, the culture and the historical context can sometimes clarify some events that have taken place in a book. It’s the case in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns written by Khaled Hosseini and published in 2007 in which the setting clearly impacts the plot and the characters.

First of all, let’s take a look to the setting itself. A Thousand Splendid Suns takes place in Afghanistan, more specifically in cities like Kabul, Irat and Muree. The story of this novel happen on a long period of time, approximately from 1974 to 2003. What should be retained from those facts is that the story is going in the Middle East, a Islamic country in which the religion has a major influence in the culture and that Afghan society is known to be misogynist. Also, during the

First, the aspect of the setting that has a major influence on the characters would be without hesitation the culture. In this novel, the cultural context is really important because it helps us understand the action and the role of the characters in society. For example, the numerous session of beating from Rasheed toward the girls is understandable with the setting that show people how the woman condition is, very archaic. Also, the marriage (p.46-47) and the procreation (p.219) at such a young age seem normal du to the cultural context that has been set up since the beginning of the novel. Second, the location, in Afghanistan, a country isolated and not very industrialised, has a consequence on the character’s choices. They can’t leave, they can’t decide to go far away because they don’t have the ways to do it. Moreover, they have their own struggles related to their location, temperature, season, that may also have directed their