“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini: Amir hears the cold, dark voice of his alternate personality, who criticizes Amir’s childhood playmate, Hassan

In the first hundred pages of this novel, the first-person protagonist, Amir, looking back from 2001, recalls his life as a twelve-year-old boy in 1970s Afghanistan. His mother had died when he was born. His father, rich and manly, has always treated Amir, a budding writer, as a big disappointment.

After winning the Kite-flying competition, Amir witnesses his Kite-flying partner and lifelong playmate, Hassan, being raped by a Hitler-admiring bully and two accomplices. Amir fails to intervene, because he fears that he, himself, would be severely beaten. Moreover, he does not tell his father about the rape, because his failure to defend Hassan would reinforce his father’s disappointment in him. Then he compounds his moral guilt by plotting to have Hassan move far away, so that Amir would not be continually reminded of his own cowardice.

Earlier in the novel, there had been an incident that helps explain why Amir later fails to defend Hassan: Amir reads one of his short stories to Hassan, a story in which a character commits murder to make himself cry, because his tears are magically turned into pearls. Hassan asks why the character could not have made himself cry with an onion.

“I was stunned. That particular point, so obvious it was utterly stupid, hadn’t even occurred to me…Taught by Hassan, of all people. Hassan who couldn’t read and had never written a single word in his entire life. A voice, cold and dark, suddenly whispered in my ear, What does he know, that illiterate Hazara? He’ll never be anything but a cook. How dare he criticize you?” (1, p. 34).

Comment

Most nonpsychotic, normal people do not hear rational voices who seem to have opinions, and who address the regular self as “you.” Only people with multiple personality hear such voices. Thus, Amir, who is a nonpsychotic, normal, budding fiction writer, was hearing the voice of an alternate personality.

Assuming that the author was not knowingly and intentionally building a case that Amir had multiple personality, then the author may have mistakenly thought that most people hear such voices, because the author occasionally did.

1. Khaled Hosseini. The Kite Runner [2003]. New York, Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2013.