The Kite Runner Chapter 3 Quotes
The Kite Runner Chapter 3 Quotes
How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote 7
Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands. If the story had been about anyone else, it would have been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate – sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school. But no one ever doubted the veracity of any story about Baba. And if they did, well, Baba did have those three parallel scars coursing a jagged path down his back. I have imagined Baba's wrestling match countless times, even dreamed about it. And in those dreams, I can never tell Baba from the bear. (3.1)
When Shmoop writes its own novel we're going to begin it with the following sentence: "Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare hands." How amazing is that sentence? It's pretty amazing. Amir even goes on to argue this tale is not typical Afghan storytelling and exaggeration. Jeez Louise, Baba sounds like a stud. Imagine if you heard a story about how your father wrestled with a bear when you were a kid. You'd probably alternately fear and adore the guy, just like Amir. But things aren't all rosy in this bear-wrestling world of ours. Amir begins to dream of his father and the bear; and in the dreams he can't tell which figure is his father and which is the bear. Sounds to me like somebody's father is getting a little scary. We mean, a bear is the closest thing to a monster in the wild, besides maybe a rhino or a mutant gorilla.
Quote 8
In school, we used to play a game called Sherjangi, or "Battle of the Poems." The Farsi teacher moderated it and it went something like this: You recited a verse from a poem and your opponent had sixty seconds to reply with a verse that began with the same letter that ended yours. Everyone in my class wanted me on their team, because by the time I was eleven, I could recite dozens of verses from Khayyám, Hãfez, or Rumi's famous Masnawi. One time, I took on the whole class and won. I told Baba about it later that night, but he just nodded, muttered, "Good."
That was how I escaped my father's aloofness, in my dead mother's books. That and Hassan, of course. I read everything, Rumi, Hãfez, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming. When I had finished my mother's books – not the boring history ones, I was never much into those, but the novels, the epics – I started spending my allowance on books. I bought one a week from the bookstore near Cinema Park, and stored them in cardboard boxes when I ran out of shelf room. (3.38-39)
Literature and writing play a more important role in The Kite Runner than you might think. Hosseini mentions books and big names occasionally, but not often enough to construct a neon sign reading AMIR IS GOING TO BECOME A WRITER. But the fact that Amir does choose to become a writer is very important. It's tied to his complicated relationship with Baba. As this passage points out, writing and reading become an escape from Baba's coldness. However, as we gather later in the novel, Amir writes about Baba in his own works of fiction. So, later in the novel, writing doesn't allow Amir to simply escape his father's distance but instead helps him enter it and understand it.