“The Kite Runner” a novel by Khaled Hosseini is scheduled for Broadway:  "Chameleon Flies From ‘Blacklist’ to ‘Kite Runner’" https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/theater/the-kite-runner-amir-arison.html

"Chameleon" may suggest actor has multiple personality trait.

Note: Search "chameleon" for related posts.

Three Past Posts on the novel from 2019

“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.

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini (post 2): An alternate personality cautions cowardly Amir against a fight to the death with a psychopath

Many years later, Amir—having been living in California, gotten married, and published several novels—learns that Hassan is dead, but that Hassan’s son is an orphan living in Taliban-terrorized Afghanistan.

Indeed, as Amir is shocked to learn, Hassan had been his half brother, making Hassan’s son Amir’s nephew. So now the only way that Amir can resolve his guilt for not having intervened in Hassan’s rape (see previous post) is to save the nephew.

Coincidentally, the psychopathic Taliban ringleader who has taken abusive custody of the young nephew is the very same man who had raped Hassan many years before. And so there is going to be a showdown, a physical fight, potentially to the death, between the mild-mannered novelist and the brass-knuckled sadist.

In the following passage, italics are once again used by the author to indicate when an alternate personality is talking. Also note Amir’s reference to it as “part of me” who is speaking. People with undiagnosed multiple personality often to refer to their alternate personalities as being “parts” that have their own voice and mind.

“I was thousands of miles from my wife…There was a very realistic chance that I was going to render [my wife] a widow, at the age of thirty-six. This isn’t you, Amir, part of me said. You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is…God help him” (1, p. 275).

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

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini (post 3): Importance of protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality (his voices) is their irrelevance

Why, on two occasions, is the protagonist portrayed as hearing the kind of voices that are typical of multiple personality (see previous posts)? I have finished this novel, and there turns out to be no good reason for his hearing such voices in either plot or character development.

This is what I call “gratuitous multiple personality.” And the reason for it is that it reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology—or, at least, in this case, his view of the psychology of fiction writers, since the protagonist of this novel is a novelist—based on the author’s own psychology.

My finding gratuitous multiple personality in many novels is part of my evidence that many fiction writers have multiple personality trait.

Another thing I have found in many novels is “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which means that a work of fiction has unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality that are integral to plot or character development and are relevant to understanding what you are reading.

Search “gratuitous multiple personality” and “unacknowledged multiple personality” on this site for previous discussions in regard to many other writers.