Assessing Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner as a historical novel

Abstract

History should be regarded not just as a continuum of evolution but as a certain organic process that is crucially both the cause and the consequence of man’s thoughts and actions. It is a documentation of change – a change brought forth by social, political, ideological, racial and economic clash and conflict. With the coming of the Modern era, history became a living reality of human existence and the novel (in international, national and regional languages) grew into a very powerful literary expression of social reality. This paper shows how Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is not the author’s artistic re-creation of a past age and thus, how such a novel cannot be criticized for a semi-faithful portrayal of a specific historical peculiarity. The Kite Runner satisfies all the requisites of a historical novel and serves us with “concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them” as observed by George Lukacs in his The Classical Form of the Historical Novel. Partially autobiographical in strain, the novel is about the author’s own time and culture, almost journalistic at times in its approach towards war-torn Afghanistan. The Kite Runner is a powerful record of the growth and life of Amir whose journey from innocence to experience is encased within a particular socio-political epoch