Chapter+Three+-+The+Kite+Runner

Amir says: “Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands. …No one ever doubted the veracity [truthfulness] of any story about Baba. An if they did, well, Baba did have those three parallel scars coursing a jagged path down his back.” **Amir shows this attitude of being scared of a frightening father when he compares Baba to the black bear himself.** “I have imaged Baba’s wrestling match countless times, even dreamed about it. And in those dreams, I can never tell Baba from the bear.” **Amir as a hurricane.** “It was Rahim Khan who first referred to him as what eventually became Baba’s nickname, //Toophan agha,// or ‘Mr Hurricane’. **Amir is in agreement with this label for his father.** “It was an apt enough nickname. My father was a force of nature, a towering Pushtan specimen with a thick beard, a wayward crop of curly brown hair as unruly as the man himself, hands that looked capable of uprooting a willow tree, and a black glare that would “drop the devil to his knees begging for mercy….At parties, when all six-foot-five of him thundered into the room, attentions shifted to him…” **Baba was also attractive - Hosseini uses simile** when he entered a room “attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.” **Baba is generous to the underprivileged –** Amir tells us that in the late 1960’s Baba built an orphanage.”Rahim Khan told me Baa had personally funded the entire project, paying for engineers, electricians, plumbers, and laborers, not to metion the city officials whose “mustaches needed oiling.” **We learn that Amir is jealous of Baba’s affection and attention.** Amir tells us of going to a lake with Baba and Hassan and Hassan was able to skim stones much better than he was. Baba was full of praise for Hassan. “…he patted Hassan on the back. Even put his arm around his shoulder.” Amir decides not to invite Hassan on another outing with Baba to the lake. “He asked me to fetch Hassan too, but I lied and told him Hassan had the runs. I wanted Baba all to myself…” **Amir is ignored by Baba. He is “crying out” for attention, even a conversation with him.** “I asked Baba why they [the hippies] grew their hair long, but Baba grunted, didn’t answer. He was preparing his speech for the next day…I asked Baba if it was true what a boy in school had told me, that if you ate a piece of eggshell, you’d have to pee it out. Baba grunted again….’I think I have //saratan//,’ I said. Cancer. Baba lifted his head from the pages…Told me I could get the soda myself, all I had to do was look in the truck of the car.” **Despite this treatment by Baba, Amir is still thrilled and proud the next day at the opening of the orphanage when people shake his hand and tousle Amir’s hair.** “I was so proud of Baba, of us.” **Later in chapter three we learn that Baba does not consider Amir’s strengths and talents are worthy of admiration or attention. Amir wins a poetry reciting competition and tells his father.** “he just nodded, muttured, ‘Good’. **We learn that Baba married a beautiful and intelligent member of the royal family. That he had always been successful at getting and doing anything that he wanted. Except for having Amir turn out the way he had wanted a son to be.** Amir says: “With me as the glaring exception, my father moulded the world around him to his liking.” **__But that this makes people afraid of him, and hate him.__** “The problem…was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.” **Baba does not support the teachings of the religious Mullahs at Amir’s school. “**You’ll never learn anything of value from those bearded idiots…they do nothing but thumb their prayer beaks and recite a book written in a tongue they don’t even understand…God help us if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands.” **Amir is worried that Baba will go to hell because he drinks. Baba explains to Amir, his theory of ‘sin’. Theft was sin because if you told a lie you were** “stealing someone’s right to the truth…When you cheat, you steal someone’s right to fairness. …When you kill a man you steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father.” **There is another instance of Baba being a bully and intimidating Amir as he was trying to explain and Amir was giggling on his knees.** “Baba’s stony eyes bore into mine and, just like that, I wasn’t laughing anymore. ‘I mean to speak to you man to man. Do you think you can handle that for once?’…I muttered, marvelling, not for the first time at how badly Baba could sting me with so few words.” **We see that Amir is angry at himself for wasting this attention that Baba was giving him.** “We’d had a fleeting good moment –it wasn’t often Baba talked to me, let alone on his lap – and I’d been a fool to waste it….I already hated all the kids he was building the orphanage for; sometimes I wished they’d all died along with their parents.” **We learn that Amir blames himself for his father’s attitude to him.** “…the truth of it was, I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn’t I? The least I could have done was to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn’t turned like him. Not at all.” **Later in the chapter Baba confirms this sentiment/feeling when he says to Rahim Khan**: “If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son.” **We learn about Amir’s personality and how he escapes into books to get away from experiencing his father’s dislike or disinterest in him. It was also how he could get closer to his dead mother.** .”… I escaped my father’s aloofness, in my dead mother’s books. **Amir tells us why Baba doesn’t like him.** “fathering a son who preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting. Real men didn’t read poetry… real boys-played soccer just as Baba had when he had been young…” **Baba tries to get Amir into soccer and “manly” things.** “He signed me up for soccer teams to sir the same passion in me. But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own team…he settled for trying to turn me into a passionate spectator…I faked interest as long as possible…But Baba sensed my lack of genuine interest and resigned himself to the bleak fact that his son was never going to either play or watch soccer.” **Worse still, Amir was “soft”. –** He cried when a man died at the Buzhashi game that Baba took him to. “I began to cry. I cried all the way back home. I remember how Baba’s hands clenched around the steering wheel. Clenched and unclenched. …I will never forget Baba’ valiant efforts to conceal the disgusted look on his face as he drove in silence.’ **Baba explains to Rahim Khan what he doesn’t like about how Amir is turning out. “**...he is always buried in those books …I wasn’t like that…and neither were any of the kids I grew up with.” “Sometimes I look out this window and I see him playing on the street with the neighbourhood boys…they push him around, take his toys …give him a shove …a whack…he never fights back.” “Hassan always steps in and fends them off. ..and when they come home, I say to him, ‘How did Hassan get that scrape on his face?’ …he says ‘He fell down.’ I’m telling you Rahim, there is something missing in that boy.” “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man ho can’t stand up to anything.” // Perceptive comment: this is an example where a child who has not been unconditionally loved and supported feels tremulous or scared to stand up for themselves. Humans need unconditional love from parents to develop a platform of self-esteem so they can then go out and face the world from their own inner strength. Amir never developed this foundation. //
 * Chapter Three – __The Kite Runner,__ by Khaled Hosseini **
 * This chapter opens with a description of Baba by Amir. Hosseini uses metaphor to compare Baba to a storm and a wild black bear. **
 * We learn that Amir is afraid of Baba. At a deep level he is scared of his father and his father’s potential dislike of him. **
 * We see that Baba makes up his mind about what is right or wrong, good or bad. That he is powerful enough to enforce his opinions on people around him. **
 * Baba is envious but glad that Rahim Khan can understand his son, even if he can’t. Rahim Khan just thinks that Amir has to find his own way and doesn’t have a mean streak. Amir quickly develops one when the next day he snaps at Hassan when he asked if something was bothering him. **