“True redemption.. is when guilt leads to good”, Hosseini once said. Every choice in your life comes with a consequence that follows, but can a persons’ past define them for the rest of their future?

Set in Kabul Afganistan, The Kite Runner written by Khaled Hosseini tells the story of a friendship between a wealthy boy’ Amir and the son of his father’s servant Hassan. Amir discovers the consequence of guilt after making decisions throughout his childhood that results in scarring him forever. Hosseini describes how the strengths and weaknesses of character, can cause destructive guilt to consume them for the rest of their lives. Throughout the novel we witness Amir’s weaknesses during certain events become the downfall of him. However, we also witness self-growth as he undergoes change into a person that he has been continuously trying to be.

Amir is an insecure boy who craves attention, praise and acceptance from his father. All his life Amir knew he wasn’t the son his father always wanted “because the truth of it was, I always felt like Baba hated me little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife,…The least I could have done was to have the decency to have turned out a little more like him..”. The guilt Amir has for “killing his mother” allows us to understand, the selfish weakness he perceives for the desire to impress his father. In Amir’s eyes, he knew his only chance to get this attention from Baba, was by winning the kite flying contest, maybe then “…..my life as a ghost in this house would finally be over”. However, on that winter afternoon of 1975, Amir’s choice to turn his back on Hassan illustrates to us that the guilt Amir had been carrying all his childhood was so powerful that he would even destroy the one relationship he had with someone. His selfish weakness consumed him so much that, he used Hassan to get the redemption he wanted, from the person that cared about him the least. When Amir describes looking into the alleyway and says “I opened my mouth, almost said something … The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had.” Hosseini makes us come to the understanding that Amir like many people can’t overcome this guilt, therefore he’s driven into a corner where the only outlook he started to have was the easiest way out. Instead of confronting this guilt, he turned away from it letting his selfish weakness sacrifice Hassan to fix it. Hosseini uses the phase in the quotation “the rest of my life might have turned out differently” to show us that however times we try to use or blame other things or people to fix the internal guilt we have the more it’s not going to disappear. Like anything you can’t run from the truth you have to turn round and face it otherwise, it will be chasing you for the rest of your life.

Later on in the novel, Hosseini gives us an understanding of how the conscious guilt Amir had carried never left him when he betrayed Hassan. This made his selfish and insecure weakness resurface again. His inability to not handle the guilt drives him to make a decision he thought would end all the guilt he has caused. “This was Hassan’s final sacrifice for me … a part of me was glad. Glad that this would all be over with soon … I wanted to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.” Through the author’s use of this quote, we are able to see how Amir’s selfish and cowardly weakness still lies within him. When he says “this was Hassan’s final sacrifice for me” it shows us how Amir is still caught under the illusion that sacrificing Hassan will let go of all the guilt he carries. He is driven to plant the watch under the bed, as yet again he believes that if Hassan leaves, all the guilt will leave with him as well. Through Amir’s guilt, we are shown that if you are unable to overcome your weakness, it can start to drive you to make even worse decisions resulting in a life where it starts to define you. This is shown when Amir says  “I knocked on Baba’s door and told what I hoped would be the last in a long line of shameful lies.” The use of the words “would be the last in a long line of shameful lies” suggests to us that he really does believe that this “final sacrifice” will stop all the guilt he has, just like he hoped the last one would. Hosseini uses this scene to show us how easy it is to repeat our mistakes unknowingly. Like Amir, we can get caught up in the illusion that something or someone will fix a problem making it easy for us to turn away from it and not have to face it. In reality, our mistakes or guilt that we carry will never leave us until we can start to accept them. Once we can do this we have the ability to learn from them and shape ourselves into a better and wiser person.

As the novel progresses we start to see the change Amir undergoes as he starts to see his mistakes for what they are. After he moves to America Amir’s weakness of selfishness leaves him with a powerless inability to deal with the heightened guilt of his past decisions. He starts to come to the realisation that no matter how far apart he is from Hassan, the guilt still clings to him “… Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.” Hosseini uses this quote to show us how the decisions you make at this moment will be with you for the rest of your life. Even though Amir is halfway across the world from Hassan what happened in the alleyway is still right next to him. However, by Amir saying this he signals he has begun to come to terms with his mistakes making him start to finally realise he can’t keep running from them. This leads to the idea “True redemption.. is when guilt leads to good”, as the change Amir needed all these years was in the mistakes he tried to ignore. This idea is later reinforced when Amir is fighting Assef and says ”What was so funny was that, for the first time since the winter of 1975, I felt at peace. I laughed because I saw that, in some hidden nook in a corner of my mind, I’d even been looking forward to this.” Hosseini uses this quote to show how Amir needed to feel the physical pain Hassan felt to start to feel relief. However, in reality, Amir didn’t need to be beaten up to feel the physical pain Hassan felt, he really just needed to start doing the right thing and learn from his previous mistakes. Amir shows us that he starts to understand this when he says ”My hands are stained with Hassan’s blood; I pray to God doesn’t let them get stained with the blood of his boy too.” This idea starts to show how the guilt Amir carried has changed his weaknesses into a strength shaping him into a better person. The message the Hosseini is trying to get across to the reader is that people can change and you can’t define a person because of their past. Like Amir we all make mistake but it comes down to how we deal with them, it may have taken Amir 26 years but the most important lesson is he has learnt from this and therefore grown into a better person.

Throughout the Kite runner, Hosseini uses Amir’s strengths and weaknesses to develop the idea of guilt. Through the character of Amir, we see the idea of how weaknesses such as selfishness and jealousy can drive us to make decisions that affect us for the rest of our lives. The consequence of these decisions can result in emotions like guilt and regret which can, therefore, heightens our emotions and drive us to make further mistakes. However, saying this as individuals we have the power to grow and learn from these mistakes shaping us into better people. The idea of remorse leads to redemption is a key idea in this novel, as it shows us how the mistakes of our past shouldn’t define our future. So where does this leave you? Is your past defining your future or you?