1, Amir, the hero and narrator of the story. Husseini, the author of the novel, admits that in most stories of the novel, this character "failed to lend a helping hand to his best friend", "cowardly" and "unlovable". The character's sympathy is not innate, but ultimately produced in the environment of the third novel.

Amir was born in 1963, a rich Pashtun family, and his mother died during childbirth. He liked to write stories when he was a child, and his father's close friend Rahim Khan encouraged him to become a writer. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Amir fled to the United States with his father at the age of 18, and then settled in the United States to pursue his dream as a writer.

2. Hassan, Amir's most loyal and intimate friend in childhood. His face is like that of a porcelain doll, and he has rabbit lips. Husseini thinks this character is a "flat character" in the development of the story, with simple personality and lack of change. He is a "lovely child, readers will support him and fall in love with him, but he is not complicated".

Hassan has always been loyal to Amir and was eventually killed by the Taliban to protect Amir's house. As the plot progresses, readers will eventually discover that Hassan is actually the illegitimate child of Amir's father and Ali's wife Sana Houbart, and Hassan has never known this secret.

According to local tribal laws, this means that Hassan is actually a Pashtun child.

3. assef, the main villain of the novel. His father is Afghan and his mother is German. He believed in Nazism and advocated that Pashtuns were superior to Hazaras. When he was a teenager, he became a bully among his neighbors. Amir thought he was a "sociopath".

Assef committed many evils when he was young. He bullied Amir and Hassan, raped Hassan to avenge Amir, and later gave Amir an autobiography of Adolf Hitler as a birthday present. As an adult, he joined the Taliban and became a leader. He also imprisoned Hassan's son Solabo and sexually abused him.

4. Baba, Amir's father, is a wealthy businessman. He is willing to give back to the community, help others start businesses and open orphanages. He is also Hassan's biological father, but this secret was never known to his two children before his death. He seems to prefer Hassan, but he is always dissatisfied with Amir.

The image of the father in the novel has some similarities with Husseini's own father. Both of them have high social status and do not strictly abide by religious teachings. In the novel, my father later fled to America with Amir and worked in a gas station. 1987, shortly after Amir married Suraya, he died of lung cancer.

Ali, father's servant Hazara, is considered Hassan's father. When he was young, his parents died in a car accident and he was adopted by his father's father. Ali suffered from polio before, so his right leg was disabled, so he was often bullied and tortured by local children. He was finally killed by an accidental lightning strike in Hazarajat.

6. Rahim Khan is a loyal friend and business partner of Dad and Amir's life mentor. He encouraged young Amir to pursue a career in literature. Later, when he was seriously ill, he persuaded Amir, who had settled in the United States, to return to Pakistan, told him the truth about Hassan's life experience, and asked him to rescue Hassan's son Solabo, and finally died peacefully.

Suraya, a young Afghan woman, met Amir in the United States and became his wife. Husseini portrayed her as an American woman in her initial creation. Later, at the suggestion of the editor, she changed her identity to an Afghan immigrant to ensure the credibility of the whole story, and the third part of the novel was revised accordingly.

In the last plot of the novel, Suraya, the daughter of Afghan general taheri, lives in the United States with her parents and hopes to become an English teacher. Before meeting Amir, she eloped with her Afghan boyfriend in Virginia. According to Afghan tradition, she became an innocent woman and no one wanted to marry her.

After she confessed this history to Amir, Amir thought that she also had a disgraceful history, and she had no right to accuse her and continue to love her. Finally, they got married.

8. Hassan's son Solabo and Hassan looked alike when they were young. After his parents were shot by the Taliban, he was sent to an orphanage, but he was taken away and imprisoned by assef and became his sex slave. Amir then rescued him and adopted him after many twists and turns. After arriving in the United States, it was difficult for him to adapt to a new life, shut himself up and not communicate with others.

9. Sa Nabal, Ali's wife and Hassan's mother. Shortly after Hassan was born, she left Ali and wandered around with a group of artists. When Hassan came of age, she came back and found her son. In order to make up for the mistake of leaving, she became a conscientious grandmother and carefully raised Hassan's son Solabo.

10, farid, Afghan taxi driver, Soviet invasion veteran. When Amir returned to Afghanistan to rescue Solabo, he turned to him for help. At first, he mistakenly thought that Amir was a black-hearted businessman and went back to Afghanistan to sell his ancestral property for huge profits, so he was dissatisfied with him.

Soon after, he learned Amir's real purpose. They turned enemies into friends and rescued Solabo together in Kabul. Farid and his wife had seven children, but their two daughters were killed in a mine explosion, which disabled him from then on. Amir spent the night in his brother's home in farid, leaving some money under the straw mat to help them live a poor life.

Extended data:

brief introduction

The Kite Runner (English: The Kite Runner) is the first novel by khaled hosseini, an Afghan-American writer, and the first English novel by an Afghan-American writer.

This novel was published by Heyuan Publishing House in 2003. In the first person, it tells the story between Amir, a Pashtun teenager from a rich area in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Hazara Hassan, a childhood friend and father's servant.

The background of the story covers a series of complicated historical events, including the overthrow of the Afghan monarchy, the Soviet military invasion, Afghan refugees fleeing to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime.

After its publication, The Kite Runner became a bestseller, widely circulated in various book clubs, and sold more than 7 million copies in the United States, ranking first in The New York Times bestseller for two consecutive years.

theme

Khaled hosseini believes that this novel covers many different themes, while critics pay more attention to "sin" and "redemption" in the novel. In the novel, Amir, as a child, failed to save Hassan from atrocities because of cowardice, and then fell into endless guilt.

Until Amir left Afghanistan, married and settled in the United States, and became a successful writer, he could not forget the scene at that time. Hassan is willing to sacrifice everything for Amir, even his life. He is like a Christian saint, constantly calling on Amir to atone for his mistakes.

After Hassan was shot by the Taliban, Amir saved Hassan's son Solabo to pay for his sins. In order to emphasize the "karma" in the whole journey of repentance to readers, Husseini adopted many strokes in the plot of the third novel, echoing the previous ones.

For example, after fighting with assef, Amir's lips were injured and cracked, which echoed Hassan's rabbit lips. Nevertheless, some critics believe that the hero has not completely atoned.

In the novel, Amir's real motivation for betraying his friends as a child stems from his sense of alienation and insecurity in his relationship with his father. This novel focuses on the emotional relationship between parents and children. Husseini once explained that the novel spans several generations, so the relationship between parents and children, complex entanglements and contradictions have become the prominent theme of the novel.

He called The Kite Runner "a story between a father and son" and "a love story".

In the process of the novel being adapted into a stage play, director Eric Ross thinks that the novel revolves around the theme of "betraying one's best friend in order to gain father's love" and then seeks the salvation of life, which is similar to the theme of Shakespeare's works.

Throughout the story, Amir longed for his father's love; Although his father has always loved him very much, he likes Hassan better and is even willing to pay for plastic surgery for Hassan to repair his rabbit lip.

References:

Baidu Encyclopedia-The Kite Runner