The definition of redemption is “The action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil” (oxforddictionaries.com). Amir, the main protagonist in The Kite Runner, watches his childhood best friend, Hassan, get raped and doesn’t tell anyone. He then goes through life living with the guilt and then trying to find redemption. The book follows Amir as he leaves Afghanistan when things went badly, and leaves to America. His good friend, Rahim Khan, tells him to come back to Afghan because “There is a way to be good again.” (Hosseini 192). Rahim has a dying wish that Amir saves Hassan’s son, Sohrab. Amir then goes through the process to try and take Sohrab to America, and by doing so he essentially receives redemption by bringing Sohrab …show more content…
By going back to Afghanistan, Amir revisits his past and takes his first steps towards redemption, forgiveness. While in the taxi with Farid, the driver, tells Amir what has changed since he left. Amir then sees through an afghan’s eye and not on a screen in his living room. While he is seeing how bad it is in Kabul he thinks about how much has changed, “The trek between Kabul and Jalalabad, a bone-jarring ride down a teetering pass snaking through the rocks, had become a relic now, a relic of two wars. Twenty years earlier, I had seen some of the first war with my own eyes. Grim reminders of it were strewn along the road: burned carcasses of old Soviet tanks, overturned military trucks gone to rust, a crushed Russian jeep that had plunged over the mountainside. The second war, I had watched on my TV screen. And now I was seeing it through Farid's eyes.” (243). He saw the start of the first war on his way to America, but the second he watched on a screen. Amir feeling like a foreigner in his own country, so seeing what Farid see’s helps him see how much he has forgotten about Kabul. He sees a “a relic of two wars” with the first war against the Russians, that is instilled in his childhood memories and the second that he experienced only through a screen in his living room. While driving through Kabul he sees the rins and the damage from the Taliban. There are homeless poele an d“Baba always carried an extra handful of Afghani bills in his pocket just for them; I'd never seen him deny a peddler. Now, though, they squatted at every street corner, dressed in shredded burlap rags, mud-caked hands held out for a coin. ... And something else, something I hadn't noticed right away: Hardly any of them sat with an adult male – the wars had made fathers a rare commodity in Afghanistan”