The Kite Runner Chapter 3 Quotes
The Kite Runner Chapter 3 Quotes
How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote 1
With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, 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. (3.12)
A later description reads: "[...] Baba had been such an unusual Afghan father, a liberal who had lived by his own rules, a maverick who had disregarded or embraced societal customs as he had seen fit" (13.97). Is Amir even describing the same person – can someone both see the world in black and white and be a liberal maverick? At first, Baba might seem just like Amir's teacher, Mullah Fatiullah Khan, whom Baba criticizes for being self-righteous and stodgy. Don't those adjectives describe someone with a black and white approach? The difference, however, is that Baba chooses his principles. ("[A] maverick who had disregarded or embraced societal customs as he had seen fit.") Which makes the character of Baba both a freethinker and an old-fashioned moralist. It's enough to make Amir's head spin.
Quote 2
I heard the leather of Baba's seat creaking as he shifted on it. I closed my eyes, pressed my ear even harder against the door, wanting to hear, not wanting to hear. [Baba:] "Sometimes I look out this window and I see him playing on the street with the neighborhood boys. I see how they push him around, take his toys from him, give him a shove here, a whack there. And, you know, he never fights back. Never. He just...drops his head and..."
"So he's not violent," Rahim Khan said.
"That's not what I mean, Rahim, and you know it," Baba shot back. "There is something missing in that boy."
[Rahim Khan:] "Yes, a mean streak."
[Baba:] "Self-defense has nothing to do with meanness. You know what always happens when the neighborhood boys tease him? Hassan steps in and fends them off. I've seen it with my own eyes. And when they come home, I say to him, 'How did Hassan get that scrape on his face?' And he says, 'He fell down.' I'm telling you, Rahim, there is something missing in that boy."
"You just need to let him find his way," Rahim Khan said.
"And where is he headed?" Baba said. "A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything." (3.60-66)
Hosseini, you and your irony. Baba complains to Rahim Khan about Amir. According to Baba, Amir never stands up for himself; he always lets Hassan defend him. And someone who can't stand up for himself can't stand up for a friend, or his principles, or anything. Amir overhears Baba's little speech and it hurts him deeply. But the irony comes into focus later when Amir watches Assef rape Hassan and doesn't intervene. So Amir secretly listens to his father criticize the betrayal he will later secretly commit. Irony and foreshadowing at the same time. It's like a party or something.
Quote 3
It was Rahim Khan who first referred to him as what eventually became Baba's famous nickname, Toophan agha, or "Mr. Hurricane." It was an apt enough nickname. My father was a force of nature, a towering Pashtun 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," as Rahim Khan used to say. At parties, when all six-foot-five of him thundered into the room, attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun. (3.2)
It's safe to say that in the novel – at least for Amir – masculinity and Baba are inextricably intertwined. Baba is what it means to be an Afghan man. Here, Amir recounts the utter presence of his father: a huge man with thick hair and a ferocious glare. But we at Shmoop – at least our psychiatry division – think there might be a tiny problem with Amir's picture of his father. This is the stuff of mythology: Amir's father uproots trees and scares the devil. To what extent does Amir, by mythologizing his father, mythologize masculinity? Does this make masculinity unattainable for Amir?