Storytelling itself functions as a protective screen against responsibility

Evidence

The text is especially interested in the tension between open and honest communication and types of mask and deceit. Amir is a wordsmith and ultimately a successful professional writer. As he comments early on, “Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys” (26). Indeed, he uses literacy as a weapon. He toys with Hassan, bowdlerizing those stories he reads to his illiterate friend and inserting his own flights of fancy into them. His devious act of planting money beneath Hassan’s pillow and then lying about it as part of a plan to be rid of Hassan’s conscience-troubling presence is symptomatic of the way that words act as a protective screen between Amir and the world and his responsibilities in it. By contrast, Hassan is always entirely open and honest, a literalist to the point of naivety. His fidelity to Amir and insight into the other’s conflicted feelings cause him to admit the theft, thereby disgracing himself and his father and ensuring his removal from the home—all to assuage Amir’s unease. Amir, the manipulator of words, confesses: “To this day I find it hard to gaze directly at people like Hassan, people who mean every word they say” (48). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 254

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does this reading — literacy as evasion and weapon, honesty as vulnerability — carry into how Hamid’s Changez and Naqvi’s protagonist use or distrust narrative? Worth chasing.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding question about what distinguishes a contesting from a reinforcing novel: here Hosseini’s amoral storyteller mirrors the novel’s own uneasy relation to its narrative.
• SEED: A critical vocabulary: ‘words as secret doorways’ versus open honesty as a spectrum along which to place Hamid and Naqvi’s unreliable or confessional narrators.