When Memories Haunt: A Psychological Approach to Trauma in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Abstract

This thesis is a psychoanalytic study of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. The life of the Afghani people is captured in the novel and how the regret the main character feels for not doing certain things that can change the course of his life. The characters of the novel are haunted by their childhood memories. Being possessed by these traumatic memories control their subsequent actions and behaviors. How memories can traumatize these characters, and their reactions once they find themselves in similar situations that remind them of what they have experienced are explored and analyzed. The current study anchors its interpretative structure in the traditional, psychoanalytic framework, it aims to diverge from and expand it in different ways. It interprets the trauma victims’ silence or uncreatability as an intentional act of resistance rather than their failure to remember and relate their stories. Moreover, it reads the novel in the context and spirit of recovery rather than within the traditional trauma theory’s limited theoretical frame of acting out, madness, and illness.