Conclusion

Hosseini uses many literary devices such as imagery and symbolism in order to help communicate social and cultural values in Afghanistan. Hosseini primarily uses imagery to help illustrate the relationship between Hassan and Amir. Hassan and Amir are friends but due to Afghani culture Hassan will always be below Amir because he is a Hazara. Hassan is illiterate but one of the ways Amir and Hassan bond is when Amir reads him stories. Amir sometimes even creates stories to tell Hassan because he knows Hassan will believe him. Hassan would wait all day to listen to his stories, “We sat for hours under that tree, sat there until the sun faded in the west, and still Hassan insisted we had enough daylight for one more story, one more chapter.” Hosseini also uses symbolism to help communicate the social values in Afghanistan. For example the pomegranate is a very important symbol in Islam, it symbolizes fertility. Both Hassan and Amir do not have mothers, which are also signs of fertility yet they bond when they are under the pomegranate tree. The pomegranate tree significant in the story when Afghanistan is in a more peaceful state but once Afghanistan is under war there are no more trips to the pomegranate tree again. 

The Kite Runner, Passage Two (Chapter 4: pages 27-28)

After school, Hassan and I met up, grabbed a book, and trotted up a bowl-shaped hill just north of my father’s property in Wazir Akbar Khan. There was an old abandoned cemetery atop the hill with rows of unmarked headstones and tangles of brushwood clogging the aisles. Seasons of rain and snow had turned the iron gate rusty and left the cemetery’s low white stone walls in decay. There was a pomegranate tree near the entrance to the cemetery. One summer day, I used one of Ali’s kitchen knives to carveour names on it: “Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul.” Those words made it formal: the tree was ours. After school, Hassan and I climbed its branches and snatched its bloodred pomegranates. After we’d eaten the fruit and wiped our hands on the grass, I would read to Hassan.

Sitting cross-legged, sunlight and shadows of pomegranate leaves dancing on his face, Hassan absently plucked blades of grass from the ground as I read him stories he couldn’t read for himself. That Hassan would grow up illiterate like Ali and most Hazaras had been decided the minute he had been born, perhaps even the moment he had been conceived in Sanaubar’s unwelcoming womb—after all, what use did a servant have for the written word? But despite his illiteracy, or maybe because of it, Hassan was drawn to the mystery of words, seduced by a secret world forbidden to him. I read him poems and stories, sometimes riddles—though I stopped reading those when I saw he was far better at solving them than I was. So I read him unchallenging things, like the misadventures of the bumbling Mullah Nasruddin and his donkey. We sat for hours under that tree, sat there until the sun faded in the west, and still Hassan insisted we had enough daylight for one morestory, one more chapter.