Influences on Social Mobility in The Kite Runner by Khaled...

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini Amir lives in a nice home in Kabul, Afghanistan, with his father. They have two servants, Ali and his son, Hassan. Ali and Hassan are Hazaras, which is an ethnic minority. Hassan is often teased and harassed by a group of boys, one in particular named Assef, who wishes to get rid of all Hazaras in the future. One day an incident happens between Hassan and Assef that changes Amir’s relationship with Hassan forever, bringing Amir to ultimately cause Ali and Hassan to leave their home. When Afghanistan’s king is overthrown things start to change and take a turn for the worst. Eventually Amir and his father must leave Kabul and the move away to America where many Afghani’s have also fled to. Amir and†¦show more content†¦Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully functional homemade camera out of a cardboard box. Never mind that we spent entire winters flying kites, runni ng kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.Never mind any of those things. Because history isnt easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shia, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing†(Hosseini 25). Therefore ethnicity and religion intertwine. This shows that those are just labels to categorize people, but really mean nothing because we as people are much more equal than people try to make the world out to be. Since Hassan had to live with this label his entire life it kept him from a better life, a better living situation, and it would have eliminated much of the harassment he faced from characters like Assef. Even though ethnicity and race play a major role in The KiteRunner, there is also an obvious distinction in social class. Social clas s is a large group of people who rank closely to each other in terms of wealth, power, and prestige (Henslin 237). There seemed to only be those that were wealthy and those that were poor. Whenever it came to the point of Afghanistan’s government falling apart, those that were wealthy