Baba is scornful when Amir tries to share what he has learned at school Analysis - Amir relates the tale that his father once wrestled a black bear, reinforcing the image created in the previous chapter of Baba as a strong, powerful man - Baba teaches Amir that "there is only one sin, only one. Amir then takes out his resentment and jealousy on Hassan - Baba was seen as a great man by the people around him - running a successful business, marrying a beautiful wife and building an orphanage - Amir believes that his father hates him because his mother died during childbirth and he blames him - Amir recalls becoming interested in reading and writing as a way to escape his father's lack of interest in him. Amir overhears Baba talking to Rahim Khan about how much more manly Hassan is and that he cannot believe that Amir is his son. Summary - Amir remembers time spent with Baba during his childhood and how his father was disappointed in his lack of manly attributes. Summary - Amir looks back and recalls that Hassan was from a lower ethnic group, the Hazara - Amir remembers how he and Hassan would get into trouble with Baba and Hassan would take the blame - We learn that Amir's mother (Sofia) died giving birth to him, whilst Hassan's mother (Sanaubar) left Ali (who suffered from polio) 5 days after giving birth to Hassan - Amir discovers that for a long time the Hazaras have been persecuted by his own people, the Pashtuns Analysis - Hassan's importance Amir and the story is shown through Amir's use of poetic imagery to describe him - "a face like a Chinese doll chiselled from hardware.eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire" - expressing the love he still feels for Hassan - Amir's first word as a baby was his father's name whilst Hassan's was "Amir" - reinforces that their relationship is based on Hassan's unquestioning loyalty to his friend, and Amir's somewhat more uncertain feelings about a friend who is also a servant - Just as Amir's descriptions of his experiences with Hassan set a pattern for their relationship, his first description of his father does the same thing - Amir wanted to spend time with his father, but Baba would tell him to leave and "read one of those books of yours" Summary - Amir, the narrator and main character of the novel, tells us about a phone call he received six months earlier from Rahim Khan, asking him to come to Pakistan - After the call, he took a walk in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where he now lives, and watched the kites being flown - He remembered his boyhood friend Hassan, a kite runner with a cleft lip, and he remembered an event from his childhood in Afghanistan in which he watched something take place in an alley - He thought about how that event moulded him as a person Analysis - The short opening chapter sets up the story in 1975 to be told retrospectively from December 2001 in a series of extended flashbacks (analepses), allowing the author to foreshadow events and build tension - The inclusion of the four names of Rahim Khan, Hassan, Ali and Baba in the short first chapter indicates that they will be important characters alongside Amir - The motif of kites is mentioned for the first time, reminding Amir of Kabul and Hassan, "the harelipped kite runner" - indicating to the audience that Hassan is significant to the progression of the plot - kite fighting had been a traditional sport in Afghanistan until it was banned by the Taliban in 1996 (AO4) - The use of a first-person narrative shows that only Amir's version of events are shown in the story which are not objective, making him an unreliable narrator (AO2) - the presence of an unreliable narrator categorises the novel as a postmodern text which often attempt to unsettle the reader or examine the meaning of texts (AO3) - The language used by Amir when he recalls the past carried a great deal of emotion - he talks about how you can "bury" the past and how it "claws its way out", invoking the image of something dead rising from its grave - he also recalls Rahim Khan's words "there is a way to be good again", suggesting that the events of the past include something for which Amir needs to atone - the repeated mention of "peeking into the alley" in Kabul in 1975 acts to foreshadow events and informs the reader that this will be a key incident in the story - Pathetic fallacy is used to reflect the oppressive and chilling emotions Amir felt on that "frigid overcast day"
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