The Breadwinner Themes

In The Breadwinner, Parvana's parents value education above all else—they're both university-educated themselves—and instill this value in their children. So when the Taliban forbids all girls...

The Taliban restricts people's freedom in order to control them, and they use prison and violent oppression to assert their power and enforce obedience to their regime. In The Breadwinner, Parvana'...

Girls rule and the Taliban drools. It's kind of ironic actually—the Taliban spends so much time and energy thinking of ways to hold women down in The Breadwinner, but Parvana and the women in her...

For Parvana and her family in The Breadwinner, suffering is a part of life. The thing is, though, that even though their circumstances are pretty awful, we see that other Afghans have it much worse...

Violence comes in all forms in Kabul—bombs, beatings, apartment raids, amputations—no one is safe, and there seems to be no end in sight. In The Breadwinner, the landscape has been shaped by wa...

What exactly is courage anyway? Is it fighting through fear, or is it not having fear at all? In The Breadwinner, Parvana doesn't want to be courageous, but she is anyway. And though courage is for...

Family is always pretty complicated, and when you're confined to one cramped room with yours for a year and half like Parvana and her family members are in The Breadwinner, you're pretty much stuck...

Emily Dickinson said, "Hope is a thing with feathers," but what does that even mean? For Parvana and her people in The Breadwinner, hope is how they get through the day. It could come in the form o...