Year 11
Unit 2 English
Revision
Year 11 English Unit 2 Revision
The Kite Runner practice essay questions
1. “He ( Hassan) knew I had betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me
once again.”
‘Amir is unworthy of Hassan’s loyalty.’
Discuss.
2. “I wanted to tell them all that I was the snake in the grass, the monster
in the lake.”
What stops Amir confessing his betrayal of Hassan?
3. Assef’s “eyes betrayed him. When I looked into them, the façade
faltered, revealed a glimpse of the madness hiding behind them.”
‘Assef is not mad, he is pure evil.’
Do you agree?
4. ‘The Kite Runner demonstrates the only way to escape the sins of the
past is to confront them.’
Discuss.
5. ‘The Kite Runner is not only Amir’s story; it is Afghanistan’s story, too.’
Discuss.
6. The Kite Runner reveals the role of courage in shaping the individual.
Discuss.
The Kite Runner Quotes
“There is a way to be good again.” (Pg. 1) This is said by Rahim
Khan to Amir to encourage him to help Hassan’s son escape
Afghanistan and finally redeem himself.
“I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six
years.”, Said by Amir, story opener that talks about the time he
betrayed his best friend Hassan in an alley in Kabul.
“There was brotherhood between people who had fed from the
same breast, a kinship that even time could not break.”
"For you, a thousand times over." (Pg. 2) This is said by Hassan to
Amir as Hassan runs his last kite, the prized blue one that would earn
Amir his Baba's praises. Years later, Amir still remembers these words
when he thinks of Hassan.
"I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him
from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of
uncertainty."
"Because when spring comes it melts the snow one flake at a time,
and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting" (Pg. 372) Refering to
the smile on Sohrab's face, the first one seen in America.
"I had been the entitled half, the society-approved, legitimate half,
the unwitting embodiment of Baba's guilt. I looked at Hassan, showing
those two missing front teeth, sunlight slanting on his face. Baba's other
half. The unentitled, under-priveleged half. The half who had inherited
what had been pure and noble in Baba. The half that, maybe, in the
most secret recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son."
p.359
"I looked down at Sohrab. One corner of his mouth had curled up
just so. A smile. Lopsided. Hardly there. But there." (p.370)
More Study Questions and Essay Topics
The novel begins ‘I became what I am today at the age of twelve’.
To what is Amir referring? Is his assertion entirely true? What other
factors have helped form his character? How would you describe Amir?
Amir had never thought of Hassan as his friend, despite the evident
bond between them, just as Baba did not think of Ali as his friend (page
35). What parallels can be drawn between Amir and Hassan’s
relationship, and Baba and Ali’s? How would you describe the
relationship between the two boys? What makes them so different in
the way they behave with each other? What is it that makes Amir inflict
small cruelties on Hassan? Had you already guessed at the true
relationship between them? If so, at what point and why?
It is Amir’s dearest wish to please his father. To what extent does he
succeed in doing so and at what cost? What kind of man is Baba? How
would you describe his relationship with Amir, and with Hassan? How
does that relationship change and what prompts those changes?
Khaled Hosseini vividly describes Afghanistan, both the privileged
world of Amir’s childhood and the stricken country under the Taliban.
How did his descriptions differ from ideas that you may already have
had about Afghanistan? What cultural differences become evident in
the American passages of the novel? How easy do the Afghans find it
to settle in the US?
After Soraya tells Amir about her past, she says ‘I’m so lucky to
have found you. You’re so different from every Afghan guy I’ve met’
(page 157). What do you think of the reasons that Amir puts forward for
this? Could there be others? How do Afghan women fare in America?
Are they any better off than they were in Afghanistan before the Taliban
seized power?
On the drive to Kabul Farid says to Amir ‘You’ve always been a
tourist here, you just didn’t know it.’ (page 204) What is Farid implying?
What do you think of his implication? Amir feels that he is 'home again'
(page 210) but how well does he know or understand his country?
How does Hosseini succeed in bringing the horror of the Taliban to
life? Why did he choose the role for Assef that he did?
'There is a way to be good again' (page 2) promises Rahim Khan, a
phrase which resonates throughout the novel. Does this prove to be the
case for Amir? How important is Rahim Khan to him?
After reading Amir's story Rahim Khan writes to him: 'the most
impressive thing about your story is that it has irony.' (page 28). It is
surely an irony that Hassan, whose ignorance Amir pillories, points out
that there was no need for the man to kill his wife to weep tears, he
could simply have smelled an onion. How important is irony in the
book? Were their other instances that particularly struck you?
How significant is the tale of Rostam and Sohrab? What does it
mean to Hassan, and to Amir?
How important is religion in the book? What attitudes do the main
characters have to it? How do they compare to the popular Western
idea of Islam?
What is the significance of kites in the book? What do you think they
symbolise? Who is the eponymous kite runner? What is the
significance of the kite scenes appearing at both the beginning and end
of the novel?
"The past is always there"- Give three examples of how this shown
in the Kite Runner
Why do you think Khaled Hosseini wrote the Kite Runner?
How did saving Sohrab allow Amir to forgive himself?
Did Amir atone for his lack of action in defending Hassan later in the
Novel?
‘Truth and Reality’ practice prompts
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. ~Philip
K. Dick
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. ~Albert Einstein
Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling? ~M.C. Escher
No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize,
and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability. ~Samuel
Johnson
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a
leg doesn't make it a leg. ~Abraham Lincoln
Most passport pictures are good likenesses, and it is time we faced it.
~Katharine Brush
There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of
our beliefs, attitudes, and values. ~David G. Myers, Social Psychology
Objectivity has about as much substance as the emperor's new clothes.
~Connie Miller
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to
enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when
they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to
pieces. ~Sigmund Freud
How do we know that the sky is not green and we are all colour-blind?
~Author Unknown
There are no facts, only interpretations. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted
by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the
rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way?
Deformations simply do not exist. ~Pablo Picasso
What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into
which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of
personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color
of the blot itself. ~Lewis Mumford, "Orientation to Life," The Conduct of Life,
1951
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. ~John Lennon
Humankind cannot bear very much reality. ~T.S. Eliot
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
~Democritus
Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their
gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblances
that may have sprung from this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and
frothed over walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw
flowers in islands of colored light - an image the normal eye captures only by
squinting. ~Eleanor Perenyi
What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life
more livable. ~Louise Nevelson
It must be hard to be a model, because you'd want to be like the photograph of
you, and you can't ever look that way. ~Andy Warhol
Few people have the imagination for reality. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is
another. ~John Burroughs
Reality is not always probable, or likely. ~Jorge Luis Borges
What happens to the wide-eyed observer when the window between reality
and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly? ~Author Unknown
Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story
than both sides. ~Frank Tyger
Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It
means their "agreement," as falsity means their disagreement, with "reality."
~William James
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on
the troubled seas of thought. ~John Kenneth Galbraith
I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
~John Steinbeck
Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a
reflection of him? ~Calvin and Hobbes
Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my
feet. ~Edward Abbey
All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality. ~Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain
If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I find it the lesser chaos.
~Robert Brault
The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays
irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own
nature with it. ~Francis Bacon
The formula "two and two make five" is not without its attractions. ~Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, 1864
Reality is too much to take in heapfuls, but sprinkle it sparingly upon life's
path and most can tread it lightly. ~Astrid Alauda
How reluctantly the mind consents to reality! ~Norman Douglas
There is a fine line between dreams and reality, it's up to you to draw it. ~B.
Quilliam
Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in
my basement... let me go upstairs and check. ~M.C. Escher
There's something beautifully soothing about a fact - even (or perhaps
especially) if we're not sure what it means. ~Daniel J. Boorstin
Reality is a palette that humans paint on to let themselves sleep better at
night. ~Author Unknown
I believe in a real, physical world. I figure if the world existed only in my
mind, it would pay more attention to me. ~Robert Brault
Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which
is not there. ~E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 1960
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. ~Jules de Gaultier
Everything you can imagine is real. ~Pablo Picasso
Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
~Emily Dickinson, "Faith Is a Fine Invention," Poems, Second Series
After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, you begin to
worry about history. ~Author Unknown
Illusion is the first of all pleasures. ~Voltaire
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. ~Jessamyn West
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does
truth become error because nobody sees it. ~Mahatma Gandhi