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When the Childhood Event Unfolds Itself: On the Survivor’s Guilt in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini



Author(s)

Emily ShuHui Tsai

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2018.10.001

National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan

This short paper aims to discuss the unbearably-heavy weight of childhood memory and the survivor’s guilt as the symptoms in the novel, The Kite Runner, published in 2003, by an Afghan-American writer, Khaled Hosseini. It describes the ambivalent relationship between the father and the son against the background of political turmoil in Afghanistan—how they have a good life together in Afghanistan and afterwards how they are forced to leave their homeland like refugees to Pakistan and then to The United States for a new life with the survivor’s guilt after the tumultuous period of the Soviet military invasion. The narrator, Amir, treasures the memories of his old homeland, Afghanistan, the innermost remnants of his being, which has become as the specter haunting his present life in the United States. Amir has to return to his old homeland to meet his father’s closest friend, Rahim Khan, and to rescue Sohrad, the son of his half-brother, Hassan, from the Taliban regime. This ethical return to the past not only has unfolded certain secrecy of his father’s dishonor but also has healed his sense of survivor’s guilt because of his evil rivalry of jealousy against Hassan to fully possess his father’s love in his childhood. In my discussion of ethnic hierarchy and conflicts in Afghanistan described in the novel, Jacques Derrida’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical concepts, such as the problematic of sovereignty, sovereign animality and bare life in The Beast & the Soveriegn and Homo Sacer, will be used to penetrate the deeper understanding of their traumatic past as haunting specters.

childhood memory, symptom, survivor’s guilt, specter, bare life, sovereignty, animality