Being Towards Death

The Kite Runner is the first novel of Khaled Hosseini,who is an Afghan American writer.Since its publication,the novel has received a lot of praises.Taking Afghan's history as the background,this novel tells a story between a Pashtun young boy Amir and his Hazara servant Hassan,and the following plots unfold around them themed as saving and being saved.The Kite Runner is published after “9·11” with the intention to opening a new door to reacquaint the world with Afghan.This novel is regarded as a work related to survival by describing vividly the manifestations of main characters fighting for living in the suffering world.Based on the analysis of the source text,this paper aims to interpret the main characters' manifestation by adopting Nietzsche's tragic aesthetic theory according to the development of time and plot.Then taking the illustration into consideration,this paper concentrates on how the main characters could live on in the suffering world by adopting that metaphysical power to find who has the typical tragic aesthetic.Nietzsche's tragic aesthetic theory is called as the positive zoobiotism.His tragic philosophical view aims at applying Apollonian spirit and Dionysian spirit to illustrating how one could survive in the dynamic world by adopting that artistic metaphysical strength.Apollo helps man to survive in the suffering world with its static appearance.Dionysian drunken destructive power accelerates the collapse of “principium individuationis”,which contribute to integrating individual with the cosmos.Both Apollonian spirit and Dionysian spirit is the source of art development.Nietzsche describes the state of Greek art before the influence of Dionysus as being naive,which only concerns appearances without artistic essence.Dionysian impulse only became artistic,and thus productive and beautiful,once it hit Greece and encountered the Apollonian impulse.Before that,it was mere destructive orgiastic energy with no value whatsoever.Under the mediation of the artistic metaphysical power,the elements of Dionysus and Apollo are inextricably entwined.Thus “will to power” is created,which characterizes by Dionysian spirit in the core and by Apollonian spirit as appearance to reconstruct the individual principle.That is the real tragic aesthetic.The main body of this thesis is accordance to Nietzsche's three levels of tragic aesthetic theory.The content is constructed by the following five chapters.The first chapter mainly consists of the information about the writer and his work The Kite Runner,the researches both at home and aboard,Nietzsche's tragic aesthetic theory and the layout of this thesis.The second chapter demonstrates the embodiment of the Apollonian spirit in the characters,and analyzes how the characters survive in the dynamic world by relying on such spiritual power.It includes Hassan's Apollonian Appearance,Amir's Apollonian Illusion,and Baba's Apollonian Restraint.The third chapter focuses on the embodiment of the Dionysian spirit in the characters,and analyzes how the characters break the individual principle at the aid of the Dionysian spirit.It is constructed by Amir's Dionysian Drunkenness,Assef's Dionysian Destructiveness,and Baba's Dionysian Outburst.The fourth chapter is the last level of Nietzsche's tragic aesthetic,which is analyzed from two aspects: the first part defines Amir as the typical tragic spirit character with sufficient reasons;the second part illustrates characters' spiritual states and the reasons why they are doomed to be atypical tragic spirit characters,which contains Hassan and his son Sohrab–the victim of rule,Baba–the approximate typical tragic character and Assef–Dionysian barbarians.After the detailed analysis,this thesis summarizes in the fifth chapter that Amir turns to be the only one who has the typical tragic aesthetic.His life is a tragedy,but he does not yield to the suffering life.He treats the life with an artistic aesthetic attitude with his “will to power”,the faith to survive in the world.The will to power supports him on the way to redemption.Whether man holds the tragic aesthetic attitude toward life or not,i.e.the affirmative attitude or negative attitude toward life depends on your inner will to be alive.