Verbal Delinquency In The Kite Runner

The lengths people will reach to get love is endless. The novel The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, is a story of Amir’s life starting in Afghanistan with his father Baba, loyal servant Ali, and Ali’s son Hassan. When Hassan is raped and Amir doesn’t stop it, Amir gets rid of Hassan and Ali in hopes of reducing the guilt. Finally, it is a journey he is compelled to set out on to make up for what he did that winter day by rescuing Sohrad, his nephew. An upheld conviction throughout this book is if a person denies love to someone else, they will stop at nothing to get it back. Amir, Hassan, and Sohrab all either experience this or are denying someone that love. This main point of Hosseini is not just something that happens in his book but is

If I were to interview one of the authors from the paper Love Deprivation, Wechsler Performance> Verbal Discrepancy, and Violent Delinquency, PhD Anthony Walsh would relate this character activity to the need for love and acceptance. Walsh and his colleagues linked those two needs to violence. The Kite Runner introduces a sociopath Assef, who ultimately enjoys inflicting pain on others. The study done is able to give a light into Assef’s actions throughout the book. When you meet Assef’s parents, it is apparent that they are not showering him with love. When the family walks into Amir’s birthday party they walk in “like he was the parent, and they were his children” (Hosseini 95). Halfway through the conversation with Assef and his parents, Amir wonders if “on some level, their son frightened them” (Hosseini 96). These two points in the novel lead people to believe that Assef’s parents are not giving him adequate love, therefore, accounting for his violent behavior. Walsh would say that Assef’s actions are explainable by this experiment. The results they found proved that a lack of love “has a stronger impact on violent delinquency than any other variable” (Walsh, Beyer, Petee 181). Throughout the book, Assef’s sociopathic actions are seen like his lack of guilt and violent behavior. Walsh found that psychopaths, who share many of the same characteristics as sociopaths, “have low hemisphere arousal” and aggressiveness relates to “left-hemisphere inferiority relative to right-hemisphere capacity” which accounts for his behavior (Walsh, Beyer, Petee 179). Therefore, another reason accounting for Assef’s sociopathic actions once again linking to the ultimate cause of love