The Kite Runner

Hassan is Amir’s half-brother and closest childhood friend. Born from a tryst between Amir’s father and his servant’s wife, Hassan is raised side-by-side with Amir. With Ali as a father, Hassan is raised to be humble with a kind heart and unwavering sense of justice. Because Hassan is Hazara, he is the target of vicious racism, constantly persecuted as a second-class citizen in Afghanistan. However, when Amir is first threatened by Assef and his friends, it is Hassan who heroically drives them away. The same courageous self-sacrifice leads to Hassan’s repeated and sustained hardships and ultimately his execution at the hands of the Taliban. He dies defending Baba’s house in Kabul long after Amir has left Afghanistan. In the wake of Hassan’s death, Hassan’s son, Sohrab, is orphaned, bringing Amir back to Afghanistan to find him and allowing Amir his chance at redemption.

Where Amir has a pronounced character arc, ending the narrative with a stronger sense of morality and selflessness than when he began, Hassan has no arc to speak of: He begins and ends the story with the humility and stalwart goodness that Amir takes his entire life to learn. Hassan is the narrative’s unwavering moral center, shifting the characters around him and often inspiring them toward redemptive acts. At various points Hassan is associated with mystical, sometimes biblical, symbolism that elevates Hassan to the level of moral paragon. Hassan’s harelip is part of a running motif in the narrative, associating characters who bear physical scarring with virtue.

As an expert with a slingshot, Hassan echoes David in his confrontation with Goliath, fearlessly defending Amir from physical threats. When Assef attacks and rapes Hassan, Amir says he has “the look of the lamb” (66). In Christianity, the lamb is an image often associated with Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross; Amir himself associates it with the ceremonial slaughtering of a sheep for Eid al-Adha. Most tellingly, Hassan is the best kite runner in all of Kabul, able to sense which way the wind is carrying untethered kites after they are cut from their lines during kite fighting tournaments. This is the novel’s central metaphor and final image: When Amir uses his newfound humility to run a kite for Hassan’s son, Sohrab, the narrative’s resolving gesture brings Amir full circle with Hassan’s goodness. In the undercurrent of The Kite Runner is a richly ironic conceit: that even a small servant boy can change the lives around him.

For his decisive and stalwart nature, Baba earned the nickname “Mr. Hurricane.” He known to be headstrong and willful, even bearing the scars of an encounter with a bear he is said to have wrestled into submission. The son of a respected judge in Kabul, Baba built his own reputation as a good man through various deeds around Kabul, paying for the construction and engineering of an orphanage out of pocket. His generosity becomes so well known that, by the time of his death, mourners from across the San Jose area as well as Afghanistan come to pay their respects. 

Baba, like Amir, harbors a strong streak of self-loathing. His demanding and aloof nature as a father to Amir is later revealed to be caused by the affair he led with his servant’s wife, bearing a son in secret—Amir’s closest friend, Hassan. For Amir, Baba comes to represent unattainable validation. When they are forced to flee Afghanistan’s destructive Soviet occupation and leave all they have behind, Amir and Baba must rely on each other, coming to accept each other's differences. After Baba succumbs to cancer, his unrelenting sense of decency and goodness carries Amir through his final confrontation with Assef, after which he dreams of Baba wrestling the bear: “He looks up at me and I see. He’s me. I am wrestling the bear” (258).

When Ali’s parents are killed by a drunk driver, Baba’s father takes Ali into his home as a servant. Stricken with polio in his left leg and a congenital form of paralysis of his face, Ali remains a paragon of humility and unwavering goodness even through his many hardships and adversity. When his wife, Sanaubar, leaves shortly after giving birth to Hassan, Ali raises Hassan as a single father, one of the few fathers in the narrative who can avoid inflicting their own failings of character onto future generations. Ali serves Baba faithfully until he learns of Hassan’s attack, growing suspicious in the days following the kite tournament. Although Baba never refers to Ali as his friend, Ali’s departure is the only time Amir witnesses his father cry.  

When placed together, Ali and Baba’s names are references to the folk story Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which appears in One Thousand and One Nights. In The Kite Runner, Ali is Baba’s polar opposite. Where Baba and Amir are distanced by Baba’s aloofness, Ali and Hassan share a close bond, serving as Amir and Baba’s servants. Where Baba is naturally suspicious of religion, Ali is devout, saying a prayer each time Hassan leaves the house. Where Baba brash and direct, Ali uses a quiet fortitude to weather adversity.

Assef is The Kite Runner’s central antagonist, representing a shadow version of Amir’s secret entitlement and selfishness. A tall, blond, blue-eyed Afghani, Assef shares Amir’s privilege and social standing. Assef is deeply selfish, willing to manipulate those around him to get what he wants. Early in the narrative, we learn that Assef has built a reputation for attacking other children, earning the name “Ear-Eater” when he assaults a boy over the prize of a kite. After Hassan aims his slingshot at Assef and tells him to leave or he will be called “One-Eyed Assef” (37), Assef seeks retribution, later chasing Hassan into a blind alley and raping him. This event dramatically intertwines the courses of Assef, Hassan, and Amir’s lives.

In the narrative, Assef is associated closely with deep evil. Early on, Amir labels Assef a sociopath, noting that even the children who follow Assef into his despicable acts are afraid of him. He is characterized by an intense racism, telling Amir he is a traitor for allowing Hassan, a Hazara, to interact with him. When Amir faces Assef again years later, Assef is a high-ranking official of the Taliban, a group of vicious religious radicals responsible for overthrowing the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, publicly torturing its citizens and waging senseless violence in the streets. Assef comes to believe he has been divinely chosen to lead an ethnic cleansing across Afghanistan. As Amir and Assef come full circle in a fight to the death for Sohrab, Sohrab saves Amir by shooting Assef in the eye.