The Kite Runner

Comparative · 2028 Leaving Cert

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner follows one boy’s betrayal of his friend and the long road back to making it right. Here is what you need to hold in your head before you sit down to compare it with your other texts.

The narrator is Amir, a wealthy Pashtun boy growing up in Kabul in the 1970s. His closest companion is Hassan, the son of the family servant Ali. Hassan is a Hazara, a member of an ethnic minority that Pashtuns like Amir’s family look down on, and that gap in status sits underneath everything the two boys do together. Amir’s father, Baba, is a powerful, admired man who seems faintly disappointed by his bookish son and openly fond of the loyal, fearless Hassan. Amir wants Baba’s approval more than he wants anything, and the kite-fighting tournament looks like his chance to win it.

He wins the tournament, and Hassan runs to fetch the last cut kite for him. In an alley, the local bully Assef corners Hassan and assaults him. Amir watches from the end of the alley and does nothing. That single act of cowardice, and the guilt it leaves behind, drives the rest of the novel. Amir cannot bear to look at Hassan after it, so he frames him for theft and forces him out of the household. Then war comes. Amir and Baba flee the Soviet invasion and emigrate to California, where Amir builds a quiet adult life. Years later a phone call from Baba’s old friend Rahim Khan pulls him back to a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where he learns the truth about Hassan and finds Hassan’s orphaned son, Sohrab. To rescue the boy, Amir has to face Assef again, and finally pay the debt he has carried since the alley.

Study The Kite Runner

Start with the angle below, then take the deeper mode breakdown inside the app. For the Comparative you only need a confident grip on a couple of clear angles, told well across all three texts.