Torn Between Two Halves
The relationship between a father and a son is the most dynamic, the most complicated, and the most difficult relationship you can find in any family. It is also the most contradictory. Society teaches men that showing emotion is to show weakness and that the most important thing a father can pass on to his son is how to be a man.
This relationship gets even more complicated and more difficult when a father has not one but two sons. Such is the tale of The Kite Runner. A tale of one father and two sons. However, not just two sons- one legitimate and one illegitimate.
In my opinion, Baba cannot give the love he has with the son he should not have had and he does not give as much as he should to the son he should give it to. Amir, the “true son”, is jealous of the brother he does not learn he has until both his father and Hassan are dead, because his brother experiences everything he longs to experience in his relationship with his father.
For most of the novel, Amir longs for his father’s love and affection. For example, Baba spends a lot of time in his study with others, drinking and smoking cigars. When Amir asks his father if he can join them, Baba would tell him it was “grown-up time” and close the door on him. Amir would sit outside the study for an hour or two, wondering why “it was always grown-ups time.” (pg. 5)
Another example is when Baba signs Amir up on a local soccer team, and even though Amir gives a valiant effort, his soccer skills are nonexistent. The harder he tries, waving his arms above his head and screeching “I’m open! I’m open!” the more he is ignored. (pg. 20) This is a metaphor for Amir’s attempts to get his father’s attention, but like the soccer game, he feels ignored.
This is especially true when Amir remembers all the times his father does not come home until after dark, all the times he ate dinner alone. (pg 18.) In fact, the night the invasion begins, Baba is away at a party when the gunfire begins. As Amir watches Ali comfort a frightened and sobbing Hassan, he denies to himself that he is jealous of Hassan. (pg 35) Is it perhaps because as every other time he needed his father, his father was not around, either physically or emotionally or that even if Baba was there and Amir was sobbing, he probably would not have comforted him. Just like the time Baba took him to see the annual Buzkashi tournament, an extremely violent sport and Amir became upset when the horse tramples the equestrian, seemingly to death, and Amir cries all the way home as Baba attempts to hide his disgust. (pg 21).
Another desire Amir has is to make his father proud of him. The most important example of this is the defining event of the novel, the annual winter kite-running tournament. When Baba makes an offhanded comment about Amir winning the tournament that year, it plants a seed in Amir’s mind and makes him decide that all his desires hinge on him winning the tournament. He decides that he would bring the winning kite home to Baba and “Show him once and for all that his son was worthy.” He begins to imagine dinners full of conversation and laughter instead of silence. (pg 56). In fact, Amir feels that he has no choice but win because he cannot “fail Baba again”. (pg 57).
I believe that all of Amir’s desires stem from his belief that his father hates him and is ashamed of him. He says that he always felt that Baba hated him for the death of his wife because she died giving birth to Amir. In fact, Amir thinks, “The least I could do was have the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn’t turned out like him, not at all.” (pg 19).
When he overhears Baba talking to Rahim Khan on the telephone one night, Amir believes this even more deeply.
“I’m telling you, Rahim, there is something missing in that boy… He needs someone who …understands him, because God knows I do not. But something about Amir troubles me in a way I can’t express. It’s like…If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son.” (pg 22-23).
What Amir desires from Baba, his father, he receives from Rahim Khan, who is a type of surrogate father. In the family’s living room with all the pictures is a picture of Baba and Rahim Khan with a baby Amir. Even though Baba is holding Amir, Amir’s tiny pink fingers are holding on to Rahim Khan’s pinky. (pg 5).
When Amir writes his first story, the first person he wants to share it with is Baba. Baba is uninterested, but Rahim Khan is not. In fact, he offers to read it even calling Amir jan, a term of endearment Amir says Baba hardly ever used with him. (pg 31).
When Baba and Rahim Khan go out later, Amir sits on his bed and wishes that Rahim Khan were his father. Then he remembers the good moments and he feels so guilty it makes him physically ill. (pg 32).
It isn’t until Amir and Baba flee Afghanistan and settle in America, that the two develop a close relationship. While sitting at the kitchen table, Amir suggests the two return to Peshwar, because Baba was “happier there”, that it was more like home there. But Baba says, “Peshwar was good for me. Not good for you. Besides, I didn’t bring us here for me, did I?” (pg 129-130).
When Amir graduates high school, Baba is there in his brown suit, the suit he wears for weddings and funerals, the tie Amir bought him for his birthday, and a camera around his neck. He puts his arm around Amir, kisses his forehead, and tells him he is “muktakhir” Proud. (pg 131).
I think Baba must consider Amir’s graduation a special occasion if he wears the brown suit he wears for special occasions and the tie that Amir bought him must mean something to him to wear it.
After Amir meets Soraya and decides he wants to marry her, he and Baba go to her parents’ house for lafz, the ceremony of “giving word”. Baba tells him he looks handsome and Amir asks his father is he is up to it. Baba replies, “Up to this? It’s the happiest day of my life, Amir.” (pg 166) .Later, when Baba is talking to Soraya’s parents he says that Amir is his only child and that he has been a good son to him. (pg 168).
When Amir is traveling to Kabul to rescue Sorab, he remembers traveling the same road, twenty years earlier with Baba and how Baba had stood up to a young Russian soldier. Amir thinks to himself, “Do you always have to be the hero? Can’t you let it go for once? But I knew he couldn’t- it wasn’t in his nature. The problem was, his nature was going to get us killed. (pg 115). Twenty years later, Amir says that Baba had made him so “mad that night, so scared, and ultimately so proud.” (pg 243).
After Baba’s death, Amir publishes his first novel, a father-and-son story set in Kabul. While he and Soraya are celebrating, she tells him that Baba would have been proud of him and Amir agrees, wishes Baba could have been there. (pg 183).
And when Amir and Soraya decide they want to have children, Amir questions what kind of father he will make but knows he wants “ to be just like Baba…and nothing like him.” (pg 184).
While Amir grows up yearning for his father’s love and affection, it seems like Hassan receives what Amir desires. For example, Amir remembers a time when Baba took them to the lake and the two boys skip stones. Hassan skips more stones than Amir and Baba not only pats Hassan on the back, but puts his arm around him. (pg 14).
Another example is how Baba never forgets Hassan’s birthday, even going as far as to one year bringing a doctor to repair Hassan’s cleft lip. (pg 45-46). That incident makes me wonder if Baba did that not only because he could not acknowledge Hassan, but perhaps because he felt that Hassan’s harelip was a reminder of his sin.
When Amir lies to his father about Hassan being sick, so he can go to the lake alone with Baba, Baba wants to know what’s wrong with Hassan and is so worried about him that his brow furrows. (Pg 82), which seems to me is a non- existent occurrence for Amir, that his father doesn’t seem to worry about him that way.
When Amir suggests to Baba that he let Hassan and Ali go, Baba gets extremely angry. He yells at Amir, “Hassan’s not going anywhere. He’s staying right here with us. Where he belongs. This is his home and we’re his family.” (pg 90). In fact, when Ali and Hassan are forced to leave, Baba does something Amir has never seen him do- cry. He not only cries, but he sobs. When Ali and Hassan do leave, Baba says only one word- Please- but that one word is full of pleading and fear. (pg 107).
Baba not only loves Hassan as a son, but Hassan loves him as well. When Rahim Khan fills Amir in on what has happened there in the last few years and Hassan’s reaction to Baba’s death, he repeats what Hassan said to him, “Agha sahib was like a second father to me”, and that Hassan wore black in mourning for Baba for forty days. (pg 208).
But when they are together, Baba does try to treat both boys equally. The first connection made between the boys is when Baba hires the same nurse to feed Hassan that nursed Amir and Ali says that “there was a brotherhood between two people who fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break.” (Pg 11)
Later, as they both grow up, Baba would give them both allowances. (pg 27). He would also take both of them to the lake and the movies. In fact, Amir would resent the fact that whenever he wanted to go someone alone with Baba. Baba would want Hassan to go alone.
The greatest example of how Baba tried to treat them both equally is when he would take them kite shopping. If Amir wanted a bigger, fancier kite, Baba would buy it for him, but he would also buy it for Hassan as well. Even though Amir never liked it. (pg 51).
Rahim Khan’s final letter to Amir answers all the questions Amir has about his father. In it, Rahim says that:
“Amir jan, I know how hard your father was on you when you were growing up. I saw how you suffered and yearned for his affections…But, your father was a man torn between two halves, Amir jan., you and Hassan. He loved you both, but he could not love Hassan the way he longed to, openly and as a father. So he took it out on you instead- Amir, the socially legitimate half, the half that represented the riches he had inherited and the sin-with-impunity privileges that came with them. When he saw you, he saw himself.” (pg 301).
Later, when Amir looks at a picture of Hassan and Sorab, he thinks about the revelation Rahim Khan has left him with and he can’t help but think that:
“I had been the entitled half, the society-approved, legitimate half, the unwitting embodiment of Baba’s guilt. I looked at Hassan…Baba’s other half. The unentitled, unprivileged half, the half who inherited what had been pure and noble in Baba. The half that maybe, in the recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son.” (pg 359)
In conclusion, it seems like the roles of Amir and Hassan are reversed, at least in Amir’s eyes. Hassan was the legitimate son and Amir, the illegitimate son. Hassan, the true son and Amir, the bastard son. But this knowledge brings with it acceptance and forgiveness because now with his newfound “son”, his nephew Sorab, Amir has learned that Baba could have taught him- that in the end all any father can do is the best that they can in spite of the mistakes they will invariably make and hope that their children turn out all right. And that true redemption is when guilt leads to good. And that two halves make a whole.
Works Cited
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Penguin Group, 2003.
