Character Sketch
Amir, the main character of the book, shows so much to the reader. The book is written as though he is telling it and is about his life from birth, to growing old. In the beginning, he is a young Afghan boy who doesn't really have a care. He is always trying to get his fathers attention and is running around Kabul with his friend Hassan. Around the age of 10 or 11 he begins to become selfish. Hassan is like family since his father is their servant and Babas friend (Amirs father) and Amir grows jealous of Baba treating Hassan like a son. He wants all eyes to be on him and only him. Hassan would do anything for Amir, even eat the dirt Amir walks on. He is so loyal to him that it drives Amir to the point of insanity almost. After Hassan takes a brutal beating for Amir and Amir fails to do anything about it, Ali (Hassans father) and Hassan decide to move out. The loss of the two was hard for Baba and slightly painful for Amir, but he also saw this as a chance to have Baba all to himself.
Years pass by and eventually Baba and Amir move to America and start their lives in California when war breaks out in Kabul. They leave their house to a trusted servant Rahim Khan. Baba becomes a merchant at a market in California while Amir follows his dreams of becoming a writer. A family from Kabul happens to be working in the same market as Baba and Amir grows fond of her. He ends up taking her hand in marriage and she moves in with Baba and Amir so she can take care of the now ill Baba. Baba ends up passing away when Amir is in his 20s leaving Amir with a hole in his heart.
After about four years of marriage, Amir and Soraya (his wife) decide on starting a family. After many years of trying and failing Amir continues to evolve in his writing career as Soraya becomes a teacher. Amir is now a mature intellect, still haunted by memories of Kabul that Soraya is unaware of, making him still remain as a coward instead of a hero. Within this time period, Amir receives a call from Rahim Khan who is slowing running out of time. Amir takes a trip over to visit Rahim who no longer resides in Amirs old house in Kabul.
In the time Amir spends in Afghanistan again, he slowly becomes his old childhood self. The coward who failed to fight, the coward to never stood up to people, and the coward who let Hassan get raped. Amir learns through his visit with Rahim many stories and secrets that leave him questioning his childhood and himself. He finds out that Hassan had moved in and taken care of Rahim as he grew sick with the help of his wife. He was told of the son Hassan and his wife had in that same house the two boys had grown up in together and even saw a picture of Hassan and his only child Sohrab. His happiness for Hassan dies when he discovers that when the Taliban came to Kabul to end the war, they massacred all the Hazaras, which was exactly what Hassan was. Hassan was taken to the street, shot in the head and then his wife was shot as well, and his child was sent to an orphanage. But one of the most depressing things Amir learns is that Hassan was really his half-brother..
Amir becomes a true man when he rescues Sohrab and after a few difficult bumps in the road, takes him in as his own son and takes him back to America with him. The ending of the book shows Amir as an older man who had been a coward who would never fight for anything, to a man that fought a Taliban man for Sohrab, fought through unbearable wounds, witness an attempted suicide from Sohrab and fought the hardest he had even fought before for someones forgiveness. Sohrabs. Making him an honorable hero.
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