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?
Quote 4
Of course, marrying a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting...well, that wasn't how Baba had envisioned it, I suppose. Real men didn't read poetry – and God forbid they should ever write it! Real men – real boys – played soccer just as Baba had when he had been young. [...]. He signed me up for soccer teams to stir the same passion in me. But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own team, always in the way of an opportune pass or unwittingly blocking an open lane. I shambled about the field on scraggly legs, squalled for passes that never came my way. And the harder I tried, waving my arms over my head frantically and screeching, "I'm open! I'm open!" the more I went ignored. (3.40)
Amir isn't the masculine Pashtun Baba wanted. He isn't a sports-playing, bear-hunting man of a boy. (Really, Baba wants someone like himself.) Said another way, Baba's dislikes Amir as a son. We might question Baba's definition of manhood (what if you don't like sports?) but, as a boy, Amir doesn't have that privilege. Baba is everything to him. Thus, Amir needs to acquire some manliness if he's going to gain Baba's respect. This, of course, leads to disastrous consequences.
Quote 5
But at the moment, I watched with horror as one of the chapandaz fell off his saddle and was trampled under a score of hooves. His body was tossed and hurled in the stampede like a rag doll, finally rolling to a stop when the melee moved on. He twitched once and lay motionless, his legs bent at unnatural angles, a pool of his blood soaking through the sand.
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. Mostly, I will never forget Baba's valiant efforts to conceal the disgusted look on his face as he drove in silence. (3.45-47)
Baba takes Amir to a Buzkashi tournament. In this sport, a skilled horseman (chapandaz) picks up a goat carcass and tries to drop it into a special circle. The horseman does all this while being harassed by other chapandaz. Sounds pretty gory, right? The chapandaz at this particular tournament is trampled. And Amir cries on the way home, probably shocked by the violence of the sport. This disgusts Baba. (Though, in an odd act of kindness, Baba tries to hide his disgust.) Amir learns his lesson, right? Which is: If you want to be a man, don't cry and don't react to violence. This "lesson" brings up an important question: How does Baba's practice of masculinity actually prevent Amir from confessing his betrayal of Hassan?
When I was in fifth grade, we had a mullah who taught us about Islam. His name was Mullah Fatiullah Khan, a short, stubby man with a face full of acne scars and a gruff voice. He lectured us about the virtues of zakat and the duty of hadj; he taught us the intricacies of performing the five daily namaz prayers, and made us memorize verses from the Koran – and though he never translated the words for us, he did stress, sometimes with the help of a stripped willow branch, that we had to pronounce the Arabic words correctly so God would hear us better. He told us one day that Islam considered drinking a terrible sin; those who drank would answer for their sin on the day of Qiyamat, Judgment Day. [...]
"I see you've confused what you're learning in school with actual education," he [Baba] said in his thick voice.
[Amir:] "But if what he said is true then does it make you a sinner, Baba?"
"Hmm." Baba crushed an ice cube between his teeth. "Do you want to know what your father thinks about sin?"
[Amir:] "Yes."
"Then I'll tell you," Baba said, "but first understand this and understand it now, Amir: You'll never learn anything of value from those bearded idiots."
[Amir:] "You mean Mullah Fatiullah Khan?" [...]
"They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book written in a tongue they don't even understand." He [Baba] took a sip. "God help us all if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands." (3.13-25)
Hosseini depicts a liberal, Westernized Afghanistan through the character of Baba. Most of us probably think of Afghanistan as a traditional Islamic country – and some of that's true. But that thinking ignores the people like Baba, of an earlier era, who lived in larger cities like Kabul. Baba also has Westernized tastes: action movies, American cars, scotch. We can place Baba against the more extreme Taliban-ruled era – he's a throwback to the urban, secular Afghanistan of Amir's childhood.
Quote 7
Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands. If the story had been about anyone else, it would have been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate – sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school. But no one ever doubted the veracity of any story about Baba. And if they did, well, Baba did have those three parallel scars coursing a jagged path down his back. I have imagined Baba's wrestling match countless times, even dreamed about it. And in those dreams, I can never tell Baba from the bear. (3.1)
When Shmoop writes its own novel we're going to begin it with the following sentence: "Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands." How amazing is that sentence? It's pretty amazing. Amir even goes on to argue this tale is not typical Afghan storytelling and exaggeration. Jeez Louise, Baba sounds like a stud. Imagine if you heard a story about how your father wrestled with a bear when you were a kid. You'd probably alternately fear and adore the guy, just like Amir. But things aren't all rosy in this bear-wrestling world of ours. Amir begins to dream of his father and the bear; and in the dreams he can't tell which figure is his father and which is the bear. Sounds to me like somebody's father is getting a little scary. We mean, a bear is the closest thing to a monster in the wild, besides maybe a rhino or a mutant gorilla.
Quote 8
In school, we used to play a game called Sherjangi, or "Battle of the Poems." The Farsi teacher moderated it and it went something like this: You recited a verse from a poem and your opponent had sixty seconds to reply with a verse that began with the same letter that ended yours. Everyone in my class wanted me on their team, because by the time I was eleven, I could recite dozens of verses from Khayyám, Hãfez, or Rumi's famous Masnawi. One time, I took on the whole class and won. I told Baba about it later that night, but he just nodded, muttered, "Good."
That was how I escaped my father's aloofness, in my dead mother's books. That and Hassan, of course. I read everything, Rumi, Hãfez, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming. When I had finished my mother's books – not the boring history ones, I was never much into those, but the novels, the epics – I started spending my allowance on books. I bought one a week from the bookstore near Cinema Park, and stored them in cardboard boxes when I ran out of shelf room. (3.38-39)
Literature and writing play a more important role in The Kite Runner than you might think. Hosseini mentions books and big names occasionally, but not often enough to construct a neon sign reading AMIR IS GOING TO BECOME A WRITER. But the fact that Amir does choose to become a writer is very important. It's tied to his complicated relationship with Baba. As this passage points out, writing and reading become an escape from Baba's coldness. However, as we gather later in the novel, Amir writes about Baba in his own works of fiction. So, later in the novel, writing doesn't allow Amir to simply escape his father's distance but instead helps him enter it and understand it.