The Kite Runner’s binary moral scaffolding pits fair-minded America against self-destructive Afghanistan.

Evidence

Truth is opposed to lies: innocence to guilt; freedom to tyranny; cowardice to bravery; optimistic, fair-minded America to melancholic, self-destructive Afghanistan; and action to the rather slippery and unsatisfactory activity of writing. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 246

Categorization

• XREF: The America/good-vs-Afghanistan/bad binary is precisely the structure Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Naqvi’s Home Boy complicate or invert — the reader’s hinge work.