Analytical framework

Religion (Marx)

According to Marx, one of the main ‘functions’ of religion is to prevent people making demands for
social change by dulling pain of oppression, as follows:

The promise of an afterlife gives people something to look forwards to. It is easier to put up with
misery now if you believe you have a life of ‘eternal bliss’ to look forward to after death.

Religion can offer hope of supernatural intervention to solve problems on earth: this makes it
pointless for humans to try to do anything significant to help improve their current conditions.

Religion can justify the social order and people’s position within that order.

In Marx’s own words:

‘In religion people make their empirical world into an entity that is only conceived, imagined, that
confronts them as something foreign’.

ALIENATION (Marx)

The process whereby the worker is made to feel foreign to the products of his/her own labour.

Marx claims,

Humans are reduced to the level of an animal, working only for the purpose of filling a physical gap,
producing under the compulsion of direct physical need.

Marx identified urban industrial workers, whom he called the proletariat, as the class that would
bring about an end to the history of class struggle, which for Marx was the driving force of history.
Marx characterized the condition of urban industrial workers as one of isolation, dehumanization,
and separation from their very human essence. Marx defined this condition as alienation.

Basically, the separation or estrangement of human beings from some essential aspect of their
nature or from society, often resulting in feelings of powerlessness or helplessness.

Overview

Kite Runner is rich with historical history, and can be a huge aid in teaching students about the
history of Afghanistan. Throughout the novel, readers see through Amir’s eyes the fall of
Afghanistan’s monarchy due to the Soviet Union’s military intervention, the mass of refugees to
Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime. On top of all of this, is the daily
clashing of the classes: Hazara’s (Shi’a Muslims) and Pashtuns (Sunni Muslims).

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the
unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul.
Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan grow up in different
worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir's father's
servant, is a Hazara -- a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the
eventual tragedy of the world around them. When Amir and his father flee the country for a new life
in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of
Hassan behind him.

The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship and betrayal, and about the price of loyalty. It is about
the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of fathers over sons -- their love, their
sacrifices, and their lies. Written against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction
before, The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being
destroyed. But through the devastation, Khaled Hosseini offers hope: through the novel's faith in the
power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities, he shows us for redemption.

Analysis