Ethnicity In The Kite Runner Essay

The Melting Pot that Refuses to Melt: Ethnicity in The Kite Runner

Ronald Reagan once said, “The Afghan people have paid a terrible price in their fight for freedom” (Reagan). But one must ask, freedom for who, precisely? It certainly doesn’t appear to be freedom for the many ethnic minorities living in Afghanistan, who have been experiencing various degrees of discrimination and oppression since the country’s inception. Another question comes to mind when reading Reagan’s quote: in a society as heterogeneous and tumultuous as Afghanistan, who exactly are the “Afghan people”? In The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini expounds upon the virtues of Afghan community while giving a concerning portrait of its ethnic minorities. By representing entire

This is not intrinsically a problem, but the portrayal of this character undoubtedly is. In fact, the problem of characterization is apparent in the reader’s introduction to Hassan, in which adult Amir compares him to “a Chinese doll” (Hosseini 3).This phrasing places Hassan in a submissive, subservient position and robs him of any potential free will he may have had. Already Hassan is being objectified by his supposed “friend.” Dehumanization such as this, of course, leads to institutionalized apathy towards stigmatized groups and opens the door for cruelty and genocide. Again, a description such as this may not inherently be problematic, but within the context of the larger work it is worrying to say the

After all, these are the only conditions that Hassan knows, for better or worse. To illustrate, Hassan tells Amir that he “likes where he lives” (Hosseini 51) because “it’s [his] home” (Hosseini 51). Later on in the novel, Rahim Khan describes Hassan’s concerning reaction to the possibility of moving into Amir’s house: “What would Amir agha think? What will he think when he comes back to Kabul after the war and finds that I have assumed his place in the house?” (Hosseini 182). This is altruism to a clearly unhealthy degree. Indeed, it is not to be expected that the powerless would overtly be fighting back against their masters or plotting a revolution to overthrow the elite. However, one gets the sense that Hassan does not have any aspirations of his own or even much of a private life. It is lines like this that show that the one-dimensional Hassan has no agency, and a lack of agency translates to a static character. Static characters, of course, are not inherently wrong and are needed in novels; however, a static character perpetuating harmful, degrading stereotypes and cliches