Kite fighting in The Kite Runner is didactic and reinforces cultural superiority

Evidence

Kite fighting performs a similar function in Hosseini’s novel. It is explicitly linked to warfare: its young adherents compare the “battle scars” caused by the sharp glass glued to kite strings to help bring down opponents’ kites, and there are no “rules,” only customs—an observation designed to resonate with what the reader may know of the Afghan polity at large (43–45). Kite fighting and the retrieval of fallen kites—kite running—may form one of the childhood bonds between Assef and his closest companion, Hassan, and be the means by which the adult Assef finally bonds with Hassan’s son, Sohrab. Yet the prestige the activity confers, which draws adult onlookers, too, clearly invests it with a greater significance. The use of kite running is, therefore, both metaphorical and metonymic. It is of a piece with the novel’s more general deployment of details that are frequently culturally didactic and quasi-ethnographic. Exotic foods are again presented; Eid is explained for the uninitiated; and when Amir returns to a denuded Kabul as an adult, we have a lengthy journalistic description of the privations of life under the Taliban. As in Nafisi’s book, such impressions, fed to us by our focalizer Amir, now a resident of the liberal city San Francisco, flatters a readerly sense of cultural superiority at the same time as it evokes a familiar image of the perennially failing Muslim nation. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 245

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s hinge: the focalizer-inside-liberal-city device flattering readerly superiority is exactly the mechanism to test against The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s structure.
• SEED: Comparative angle: contrast Hosseini’s flattening quasi-ethnographic detail with Hamid’s refusal to explain/exoticize — that contrast grounds a contest vs reinforce argument.