Theme Of Guilt In The Kite Runner

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Recommended: Thematic essay on the kite runner

Nash-Boulden 1
Jordan Nash-Boulden
Ms. Jellison
H Eng 10 (809)
13 March 2014
Guilt is the Strongest Motivator
“Guilt is anger directed at ourselves - at what we did or did not do” (Peter McWilliams). Take a look back, even for just a moment, at one choice you have made in your life and analyze the motivations for that decision. Maybe you had given a loan to a friend because you felt guilty that they didn’t have enough money to pay for gas, or offered to take care of a neighbor’s dog because you felt you owed them from the time they kept watch over your house. This same principle applies to the characters, symbols, and plot structure of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner, in which the main character, Amir, is tasked with repairing his broken life after guiltily witnessing the assault of his childhood friend. This goes to show that guilt can often be the strongest motivator for the choices people make in their everyday lives, no matter how gentle their “push” is, so to speak.
Perhaps the most prominent example of the influence of guilt is found in The Kite Runner’s main protagonist, Amir. As a child, Amir bears witness to a horrible hate crime that is inflicted on one of his closest friends, Hassan. Though he has the opportunity to stop the assault, Amir runs away, a culpable decision that haunts him indefinitely throughout his teenage years and into young adulthood. “In the end, I ran. I ran because I was a coward… I was afraid of getting hurt… That’s what I made myself believe. I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right. Nothing was free in this
Nash-Boulden 2 world” (Hosseini, 77). But as Amir describes, the guilt goes on to haunt him and ultimately l...

... middle of paper ...

...e ever-present symbol of the blue kite, guilt is felt in the very pages of Khaled Hosseini’s meaningful novel. The literary work itself is an exemplary example of the willpower it takes to overcome a guilty conscience, no matter whether the consequences of the conscience are physically or emotionally represented in the characters. Following the path through choice and consequence The Kite Runner has laid for thousands of readers, the novel serves to remind us that the events that take place in everyday life also serve to remind us that no event comes without its consequences, and that guilt can often be the strongest motivator for those who have none.

Works Cited
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead, 2003. Print.
"Famous Quotes." BrainyQuote. Xplore, n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2014

Vocab words: penury, egregious, culpable, evanescent, pernicious

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