Guilt Quotes In The Kite Runner

After Amir, who is looking for Hassan, sees Hassan get raped by the older group of Afghan boys, Amir is reluctant to stand up for his friend and runs away. He becomes guilty of his act of betrayal and starts to avoid his friend. After getting fed up of his guilt, which emerges from seeing his friend, he asks his dad to go to Jalalabad for vacation. As Amir goes to Jalalabad with his father and other relatives, he is caught up in his guilt, giving him an uneasy ride. Even after moving away from the house for some days, he still feels guilty in their hotel at Jalalabad.

In the scene where Hassan gets raped, Amir is described as “a coward” who was “afraid of getting hurt” so he decided to turn his back “to the alley, to Hassan” (Hosseini 77). This clearly illustrates Amir’s true thoughts and how scared he was as a kid. Now he has been able to mature as he has been in America

There was a monster in the lake It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him the the murky bottom. I was that monster” (86). In the end, though, it wasn’t Amir’s refusal to help Hassan that made him the monster. It was his actions after. It was the way Hassan enacted his feelings of guilt.

While seeking his father's attention, Amir's growing jealousy of Hassan's relationship with Baba causes him to do an act of betrayal he will never forget. Amir has wanted

The deep longing for acceptance in Amir leads him to abandon Hassan in a vulnerable moment, leaving him to get hurt and beaten while he runs away and avoids confrontation with him. Hassan’s rape is the primary source of Amir’s guilt, and the reminder of his cowardice and betrayal, as he failed to stand up for his friend when he was most needed. Amir admits that the real reason behind not intervening was not only his fearfulness, but also a deep desire to win his father’s approval. He states, “Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba” (Hosseini 77). This signifies how Amir sacrificed his loyal friend, and allowed him to be harmed, in exchange for Baba’s affection and recognition.

This is once again another attempt to relieve guilt from Amir’s life. Amir tries to become a good father figure for Sohrab. Amir’s father was rarely proud and happy for

Unfortunately, Amir, one of the victims, had not been young enough to not understand. As a child, he made the mistake of not helping out his half-brother, Hassan. Even if he could have done something, he didn’t because of his cowardice, which was followed by selfishness. Betrayal made Amir the perpetrator. Due to his act of cruelty, he carried stones of guilt over his shoulder which were never shared with anyone but his own mind.

The author provides the reader with mixed feeling about Amir. In his childhood in Kabul Amir comes off as heartless person. He is this because he has done evil stuff in his life. In the beginning of the story something bad happens to Hassan, Amir says,¨In the end, I ran.

This guilt haunts Amir throughout the entirety of the novel as an obstacle that he constantly tries to overcome as shown when he finds out the truth and says, “I felt like a man who awakens in his own house and finds all the furniture rearranged , so that every familiar nook and cranny looks foreign now. Disoriented, he has to reevaluate his surroundings, reorient himself,” (Hosseini 224). This is the beginning of Amir finding out who he was as a person,and it is a big step to finding his own identity. When Amir finds out it seems as if “every familiar nook and cranny looks foreign” because what he has always used to defend himself was that Hassan was just a servant, but now he was his brother. Amir’s selfishness soon turns unjustifiable and as he now feels that it is time to finally get over his guilt and “reorient himself.”

To undo this guilt he does different actions in the positive way that show how his actions are now used for positive good deeds. Amir grows to become someone willing to die for Sohrab and believes Sohrab to be a part of his family which is ironic because Hassan was never able to become a part of their family due to social pressures. After Amir recognizes that Hassan knew all along Amir has a bigger feeling of guilt which is only washed away through constant deeds. One service is when Amir places the crumpled money for a positive outcome rather than to chase someone out, “ Earlier that morning, when I was certain no one was looking, I did something I had done twenty-six years earlier: I planted a fistful of crumpled money under a mattress ( 242) ”. As Amir grows as a character after ridding himself of different guilts he develops and grows by changing different actions that he has committed in the past as a sin.

By leaving Hassan defenceless against Assef, Amir’s disloyalty and inability to stand up for his friend truly emphasises his cruel nature. Amir physically and mentally turns away from the rape. He justifies his decision to leave Hassan by saying “I actually aspired to cowardice because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right. Nothing was free in this world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba.”

Except he’d been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles and dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster” (Hosseini 91). This quotation highlights that transformative power guilt has had on Amir.

Although, Amir shows many acts of kindness and selflessness, in the end, he was not able to truly redeem himself. To begin, Amir started his journey to redemption with conviction and confession although he was not very successful. The guilt bothered Amir very often even in his adulthood when he believed he had been denied “fatherhood for the thing [he] had done.” (188) Almost immediately after Amir watched Hassan get raped he believed he had done something wrong. He believed he could not have children with Soraya because he did not help Hassan, but he does not confess until more than fifteen years later.

Amir first realizes the depth of his cowardice as he watches Assef rape Hassan in the alley and thinks, “I could step in into that alley, stand up for Hassan—the way he stood up for me all those times in the past—and accept whatever happened to me. Or I could run” (Hosseini 77). He has an epiphany that he could choose to be brave and selfless like Hassan and step up to Assef regardless of any physical consequences. However, despite his understanding that the noble choice would be to interfere and stop Assef, Amir is unable to act on it because his fear of Assef overwhelms him. The guilt that consumes Amir in the weeks following Hassan’s rape indicates that he understands the extent of his selfish behavior and needs to resolve it before he can forgive himself.

Thus, glancing towards either direction to make sure that ‘the coast is clear’. He deprives Hassan and Ali from the house they have served faithfully for a long time, thereby stealing the truth from Hassan and depriving them of a home they knew well. Amir is driven by both the greed for his father’s attention and the guilt of being helpless when Hassan was raped. The reason why he couldn’t remain under the same roof as Hassan was because he felt guilty that he hadn’t tried to stop the rape and save his friend. The reason why he couldn’t step in to save his friend was because he was not strong enough and wanted to please his father at any