DefinePK

Abstract

This paper presents a trauma-focused interpretation of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, where the regulation of memory as a burden and a future possibility is highlighted. By examining the recollections, guilt, and narrative confession of Amir, the paper will refer to psychological trauma and narrative works to illustrate the memory of trauma that is unable to be mastered and keeps returning in disjointed flashbacks. Individual trauma, or the betrayal of Hassan by his friend Amir, is intertwined with group and diaspora trauma due to the upheaval and displacement of Afghanistan politics and individual identity dislocation. Such theoretical approaches as those by Caruth (1995) and Herman (1992) help make sense of the text and contribute to an understanding of how narrative is employed to repatriate trauma into an ethical practice. The novel is structurally perverse in that it does not operate in a chronological order, but instead the retrospective narration is overlaid with the linear chronological timeline. Focusing on the methods, such as confession, symbolic atonement, and diaspora chronotope, the paper exemplifies how memory turns into a wound and a point of narration construction. The Kite Runner eventually becomes a story of how the burden of remembrance can be turned into a redemptive process by becoming a way of fulfilling self and community, reinforced by the power of the memory and the expression of that memory through the moral act.