The Uses of Storytelling in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Abstract

In his The Kite Runner (2003), Khaled Hosseini uses storytelling for at least two purposes: to show how the first-person narrator yearns to alleviate or at least control the profoundly destructive impact of a single past experience on his adult mind and to show how, through such a recollection and reconstruction process, the narrator feels satisfied with his atonement by the end of his narration. Storytelling helps Hosseini’s narrator to reconfigure his unfavourable experiences, which act both as the central concern of the narrative plot and as a shared quality weaving the central characters together. Cognitive narratologists, such as Monika Fludernik and David Herman, consider representation of experience an important basic element of narrativity or the qualities that make a narrative accepted as narrative. By focusing on his personal and human-like experiences, the protagonist Amir’s storytelling not only functions as a significant tool to alleviate his intense suffering, but also facilitates the readers’ emotional engagement in Hosseini’s storyworld.