Reinforcing the Stereotypic Binaries: Orientalist reading of Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

KHALED HOSSEINI has been widely acclaimed for his debut novel The Kite Runner, an international best-seller. The novel not only launched Hosseini into the limelight as an Afghan-American writer but also bridged the gap between Western literary audience and the culture of the Middle East. The novel is about the friendship of two Afghan boys through the decades, and Amir, the narrator is an expatriate novelist, who like the author returns to Kabul after years of exile in California. While seemingly just a captivating story of Amir and his redemption through the heroic rescue of his childhood friend Hassan’s son Sohrab, the entire plot is imbued with noxious Orientalist stereotypes and the inevitable conflict between the West and the Middle-East. In 2006 Khaled Hosseini was honoured as a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations’ Refugee Agency. And the very next year The Kite Runner was adapted to screen bearing the same title as the novel, presumably providing evidence that Afghans too could be people , just like you and me. This paper attempts to give an Orientalist reading of Hosseini’s 2003 novel The Kite Runner.