Summary: Chapter 1
The period is December 2001, and our narrator, who tells his story in the
first person, recalls an event that occurred in 1975, when he was twelve years old
and growing up in Afghanistan. He does not say what happened, but says the event
made him who he is. He follows this recollection by telling us about a call he
received last summer from a friend in Pakistan named Rahim Khan. Rahim Khan asks our
narrator, whose name is Amir, to come to Pakistan to see him. When Amir gets off the
phone, he takes a walk through San Francisco, where he lives now. He notices kites
flying, and thinks of his past, including his friend Hassan, a boy with a cleft lip
whom he calls a kite runner.
Summary: Chapter 2
As children, Amir and Hassan would climb trees and use mirrors to reflect
sunlight into a neighbor’s window, or they would shoot walnuts at the neighbor’s dog
with a slingshot. These were Amir’s ideas, but Hassan never blamed Amir if they were
caught. Amir lived with his father, Baba, in a lavish home in Kabul. Meanwhile,
Hassan and his father, Ali, lived in a small mud hut on the grounds of Baba’s
estate, and Ali worked as Baba’s servant. Neither Amir nor Hassan had a mother.
Amir’s died giving birth to him, and Hassan’s ran away after having him. One day
while the boys are walking, a soldier says to Hassan that he once had sex with
Hassan’s mother, Sanaubar. Sanaubar and Ali were an unlikely match. Ali was a devout
reader of the Koran, the bottom half of his face was paralyzed, and polio destroyed
the muscle in his right leg, giving him a severe limp. Sanaubar was nineteen years
younger than Ali, beautiful, and reputedly immoral. Most people thought the marriage
was arranged by Sanaubar’s father as a way to restore honor to his family. Sanaubar
openly detested Ali’s physical appearance. Five days after Hassan was born, she ran
away with a group of traveling performers.
The soldier refers to Hassan as a Hazara, which we learn is a persecuted
ethnic group in Afghanistan. The Hazaras originally came from further east in Asia,
and their features are more Asian than Arabic. Hassan’s parents were Hazara as well.
Amir and Baba, on the other hand, are Pashtun. Once, while looking through history
books, Amir discovered information on the Hazara. They had an uprising during the
nineteenth century, but it was brutally suppressed by the Pashtuns. The book
mentions some of the derogatory names they are called, including mice-eating and
flat-nosed, and says part of the reason for the animosity is because the Hazara are
Shia Muslim while the Pashtuns are Sunni Muslim.
Summary: Chapter 3
Amir mixes his memories of Baba in with this information. Baba was a large
man, six feet and five inches tall with a thick beard and wild, curly hair.
According to one story, he even wrestled a bear once. Baba did all the things people
said he could not do. Though he had no training as an architect, he designed and
built an orphanage. Though people said he had no business sense, he became one of
the most successful businessmen in the city. Though nobody thought he would marry
well because he wasn’t from a prominent family, he married Amir’s mother, Sofia
Akrami, a beautiful, intelligent woman who came from a royal bloodline. Baba also
has his own strong moral sense. While Baba pours himself a glass of whiskey, Amir
tells him that a religious teacher at his school, Mullah Fatiullah Khan, says it is
sinful for Muslims to drink alcohol. Baba tells him that there is only one sin:
theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Murdering a man, for instance, is
stealing his life. He calls Mullah Fatiullah Khan and men like him
idiots.
Amir tries to please Baba by being more like him but rarely feels he is
successful. He also admits to feeling responsible for his mother’s death. Since Baba
likes soccer, Amir tries to like it as well, albeit unsuccessfully. What Amir is
good at is poetry and reading. But he worries his father does not see these as manly
pursuits. When he and Baba went to see a match of buzkashi, a popular game in
Afghanistan in which a rider must put an animal carcass in a scoring circle while
other riders try to take it from him, a rider was trampled after falling from his
horse. Amir cried, and Baba could barely hide his disdain for the boy. Amir later
overhears Baba talking to his business associate, Rahim Khan, the man that later
calls Amir from Pakistan. Baba says Amir is not like other boys, and he worries that
if Amir can’t stand up for himself as a child, he will not be able to do so as an
adult.
Analysis
The first three chapters set out the basic facts of the story, including who
the major characters are, their backgrounds, and what their relationships with each
other are like. The section also establishes a context for the information: Amir,
our narrator, is an adult living in the United States and looking back on his
childhood years in Afghanistan. In fact, history is an important theme in the novel,
and looking back on the past is a recurring motif. That’s because, for Amir, the
past is not over. He believes it to be a fundamental part of who he is, and no
matter how far he is in time or location from his childhood in Afghanistan, the
events of that period are always with him. Though it remains unclear why, he feels a
tremendous sense of guilt about those events, and he believes they shaped him into
who he is. This guilt, in fact, informs the entire narrative. Appropriately, he
opens the novel in the present then quickly jumps back in time.
The author, Khaled Hosseini, spends much more time on characterization than
action in this section. In terms of plot, little happens. Instead, Khaled Hosseini
introduces us to the personalities of the characters. We learn that the boy Amir is
sensitive, bookish, sometimes selfish, and a little mischievous. He is eager to
please Baba, whom he views as a role model he can never live up to. Yet he feels
Baba does not love him because he is not like Baba and because it was during his
birth that his mother died. Baba, meanwhile, is gruff, hardworking, a little distant
from Amir, and very much an independent thinker. Anytime someone said he would fail,
he didn’t listen, and he always succeeded. He doesn’t always listen to religious
authorities either, evidenced by the fact that he disregarded Mullah Fatiullah Khan
saying it is a sin to drink alcohol. Ali, meanwhile, is dutiful, modest, and quiet.
Lastly there’s Hassan, who is a loyal and courageous friend. When Amir is
threatened, Hassan intervenes. He has his own vulnerabilities, however, particularly
regarding his mother.
Significantly, both Hassan and Amir have lost their mothers. They have only
their fathers and each other. The relationship between fathers and sons, and between
the older generation and the new one, is a major theme of the story. Also, in many
ways Amir and Hassan act for each other as a kind of substitute parent, looking out
for the other and providing companionship. They are closer than regular friends.
They are more like brothers who are on occasion reminded that one is Pashtun and one
Hazara. Their relationship plays a central role in the book, and it figures in
another theme that is introduced in this section: standing up for what is right. The
theme is introduced primarily through Baba, who worries that if Amir can’t stand up
for himself as a young boy, he may not be able to stand up for what is right as an
adult. He says this because he sees Hassan standing up for Amir in fights while Amir
appears to back down.
The section additionally introduces the reader to Kabul, the capital of
Afghanistan and the location of the events. Khaled Hosseini’s main audience for the
book is not Afghan, and he familiarizes his readers with life in Afghanistan by
explaining some basic facts. Using the characters of Baba and Amir on one side and
Ali and Hassan on the other he lays out all the divisions—economic, ethnic, and
religious—present in the country during the late 1970s. Baba and Amir, for instance,
are rich and live in a large mansion, while Ali and Hassan are poor and live in a
small hut on Baba’s property. Related is the difference in the health of the rich
and the poor, who cannot afford proper medicine. Baba and Amir are both healthy, but
Ali and Hassan both suffer from problems affecting their faces. Furthermore, Baba
and Amir embody the Pashtun population, whereas Ali and Hassan are part of the
Hazara minority, a group subjected to relentless racism in Aghanistan. A related
divide in religions is also present: like most Pashtuns, Baba and Amir are Sunni
Muslim, while Ali and Hassan, like most Hazaras. are Shia Muslim. (The difference
between Sunni and Shia is something like the difference between Catholic and
Protestant Christians. They share the fundamental beliefs of Islam, that there is
only one god and that Muhammad was his prophet for instance, but some of their other
beliefs and practices differ.)
One additional divide hinted at in this section is that between Islamic
fundamentalists, such as Amir’s teacher, Mullah Fatiullah Khan, and more liberal
Afghans like Baba. Baba’s words in Chapter 3 foreshadow the eventual takeover of
Afghanistan by the radical Islamic fundamentalists called the Taliban. “God help us
all if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands,” he says, after calling Mullah
Fatiullah Khan and those like him “self-righteous monkeys” (p. 17). It will be
decades before this happens in the novel, but the political events leading up to the
rise of the Taliban, beginning in the 1970s and continuing through 2001, will play a
major role throughout the book.
