Silence and Secrets as Response to Injustice: A Subaltern Study in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Abstract

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner set in Afghanistan and the United States from the 1970s to 2002, presents a story of intertwined personal conflicts and tragedies against a historical background of national and cultural trauma. The novel accounts for the culture of Kabul everything from the melon sellers in the bazaar to the cosmopolitan social and intellectual lives of Kabul elite society during the monarchy, to the traditional pastimes of Afghan children. The novel pursues the complicated story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman and Hassan, a loathed minority, the son of Amir’s father’s Hazara servant Ali. Though, Amir and Hassan are close friends, they live drastically different lives by virtue of their status. Hassan, like as his father Ali, is loyal and devoted servant who is always ready to die for his master. Ali and Hassan represent pathetic Hazaras who are the subject of social discrimination. Their resistance of social domination points how nationalism and mainstream history has gauged the voice of lower strata working class peasants in Afghanistan. The Kite Runner is also a story about the collapse of civil society and the violation of fundamental human rights that commonly takes place in the background of ethnic and racial discrimination, religious intolerance, the oppression of women and children, war crimes, the plight of refugees, etc. This research reveals the structural contingencies in Afghan society from a subaltern perspective.