Betrayal, Uncertainty Of Values, Redemption:an Interpretation Of Moral Predicament In The Kite Runner And Its Symbolic Meaning

The novel The Kite Runner depicts a story of an adult trying to make right the overwhelming wrong he committed as a child and pursuing the road to redemption under the harassment of his own guilt and self-accusation. The author Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan American, and this is his debut novel. After its publication, it has attracted continuous attention and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a long time. With the perspective of moral predicament, this paper provides an interpretation of three themes, betrayal, uncertainty of values and the road to redemption, adding an analysis of the symbolic meaning in a national sphere. The destiny of children represents the destiny of the whole nation and is influenced by the national environment. The ups and downs of the child in several spaces reflect the turbulence of Afghanistan in the contemporary history. Children’s drifting and search of individual identity is a miniature of the universally inner worry and confused identity of the Afghan people. The redemption of the child symbolizes the redemption of Afghanistan by different regimes. All in all, the novel reveals not only the predicament and destiny of individuals, but the national predicament and destiny in writ large.This paper proceeds as follow.The first chapter provides a brief introduction of Khaled Hosseini and his works. A literary review of domestic and foreign research is given and the blank space is pointed out. Then it illustrates the approach theory and significance of this research.Chapter two defines the notion of betrayal, outlines four kinds of betrayal revealed in the novel, namely betrayal between brotherhoods, master and servant. husbands and wives, and the betrayal of religious belief.In the next section, the possible causes of the betrayal is given, consisting of value conflict caused by social transformation and change, the chaotic self-identification of children and the whole nation and uncertainty of morals under the certain influence of social environment and religion. The moral predicament caused by these phenomenon make children become victims during their growth. In chapter four, emphasis is placed on the construction of the road to redemption and the analysis of the redemption of characters and the nation as a whole. What we cannot be sure is that whether the redemption this time means another betrayal next time and where the road of redemption leads to. Based on the above evidence and discussion, combining with the history, the chapter concludes with that the predicament which children faced is symbolic of the predicament the nation faced.Chapter five is a conclusion of the research. In this part, the author restates the conclusion that the predicament which children faced is symbolic of the predicament the nation faced at large. At last, the limitation of this paper and its implication on readers’daily lives is presented.