Motifs

1. Rape

"Just like I pretended I hadn't seen the dark stain in the seat of his pants. Or those tiny drops that fell from between his legs and stained the snow black." (pg. 84)

2. Redemption

"I hadn't been happy and I hadn't felt better, not at all. But I did now. My body was broken--just how badly I wouldn't find out until later---but I felt healed. Heald at last. I laughed." (pg. 303)

3. Violence

"His brass knuckles flashing in the afternoon light; how cold they felt with the first few blows and how quickly they warmed with my blood. Getting thrown against the wall, a nail where a framed picture may have hung once jabbing at my back." (pg. 302)

Several motifs are found in the novel, "The Kite Runner" and the most obvious and important motif would be violence. The story circles around the aura of violence, where they live around places covered with ethnic group violence and corruption, surrounding their timeline with war, invasion, and coup d'etats. Overthrowing of governments, executions, rape, beating, and abuse are all factors that revolve around the novel of "The Kite Runner". The author used this as a major role to help and further develop the plot for example the violence between Assef, Amir, and Hassan. There is a clear violent intent for Assef which foreshadows future events that Assef would become the violent antagonist of the story. Most of the time where violence is portrayed in the story, Assef would be a key factor to the start or progression of the violent activity. However the violence playing a major role in the story also explains how Amir redeems himself at the end while getting beat to the death by Assef. The violence of the story also connects with the other major motif of this novel, rape. Rape is a huge factor that starts the guilt of Amir and ties in with Assef almost every time it comes up, building his character into a very corrupt, vile antagonist. There are a total of four times rape is brought up in the novel, when Hassan is raped by Assef, when Baba protects the women from getting raped by the Russian soldier, Kamal gets raped by Assef, and when Sohrab is sexually abused and raped by Assef. The motif of rape always appears in the presence of Amir, the turning points of his life. Amir explains in the very first sentences of the novel that the event of Hassan getting raped was the initial factor which had shaped him the man who he was currently. The author used the strong element of putting rape as a motif to motivate and develop the protagonist rapidly and to show us readers how much rape can affect and destroy many others lives. Due to the guilt that Amir did not stand up for Hassan when he was getting raped brings up the other motif of redemption in the novel. Amir seeks to redeem himself from that event, always putting himself on the spot that he is completely guilty of what had occurred to Hassan. He seeks salvation by saving Sohrab who was also sexually abused by Assef. The motif of redemption is first discovered in the story where Amir tries to redeem himself from Baba due to the guilt of killing his own mother. Amir feels that he must impress and receive his attention to fully redeem himself from the awful crime of killing his own mother which was completely unintentional. Redemption also plays a great factor where he must now cross over his guilt of killing his mother and receive approval from Baba to redeem himself from killing his brother, Hassan and the guilt he has for not doing anything as Hassan got raped. This ties in closely together as when Amir is trying to redeem himself for Baba, he ends up doing wrong things which drops him down even further to receive his approval and also adding in another sense of guilt that he must carry on for the rest of his life, or redeem himself in some way. Later on, Amir redeems himself of both guilts by standing up for himself as Baba always wished for and saving Sohrab, Hassan's son from Assef, Amir is once again able to fly kites without any discomfort.