91 pages • 3 hours read
Khaled HosseiniThe Kite Runner
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 14-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
The narrative returns to 2001 and the call from Rahim Khan, who beckons Amir to return to Pakistan where Rahim Khan is living, gravely ill and at the end of his life. Amir tells Soraya, who has now been teaching for six years, that he must go. On a long walk in Golden Gate Park where kites are being flown, Amir realizes that his suspicions of Rahim Khan’s knowledge of Hassan’s attack in Kabul were well founded. Rahim Khan has known all along: “Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone” (168). At night Amir lies awake in bed after a dream of Hassan in snow: “He was yelling over his shoulder: For you, a thousand times over” (169). Amir flies to Pakistan a week later.
Chapter 15 Summary
Rahim Khan answers his door in Pakistan, emaciated from sickness. Amir has not seen Rahim Khan since the night Baba and Amir fled Afghanistan in 1981. Over tea, Rahim Khan details the turmoil that has overtaken Kabul, the city broken into constant street warfare and missile strikes. When the Taliban overthrew the Northern Alliance, there was short-lived celebration, but Rahim Khan describes the Taliban’s viciousness to Amir, recounting a soccer game at which Rahim Khan was attacked for cheering too loudly. Rahim Khan tells Amir that he lived in Baba’s house in Kabul with Hassan for a short time. Wearily, he offers to tell Amir the story.
Chapter 16 Summary
Rahim Khan’s account takes place in 1986, shortly after Baba’s death, when Rahim Khan travels to Hazarajat and finds Hassan living in a small village. Hassan is married to a woman, Farzana, who is pregnant with their first child and due in winter. Hassan is at first reluctant to accept Rahim Khan’s offer, a fair wage to act as a groundskeeper of Baba’s house in Kabul, but learning of Baba’s death, Hassan weeps through the entire night, and in the morning he agrees to go with Rahim Khan back to Kabul. Hassan refuses to move into Baba’s house, instead moving back into the house where he lived with his father during his youth, and in mourning for Baba wears black for 40 days. Rahim Khan reflects that it was “[l]ike he was preparing the house for someone’s return” (179). Hassan and his wife do all the cooking and cleaning, tending the garden and painting the walls to restore the home.
In the late fall, Hassan and Farzana lay their stillborn daughter to rest in the backyard near sweetbrier bushes. Rahim Khan describes their second pregnancy, occurring near the same time that Hassan’s birth mother returns, wounded and searching for Hassan. Hassan and his wife nurse Sanaubar back to health, and the four of them live together as a family. In the winter of 1990, Sanaubar delivers Hassan’s son, whom Hassan names Sohrab after his favorite hero of the Shahnamah. He is a dedicated father to Sohrab, taking him kite flying and teaching him to use a slingshot. Sanaubar lives four more years before dying in her sleep.
Rahim Khan recounts the night they hear of the Taliban taking power. Hassan is in the kitchen listening to the radio with a “sober look in his eyes” (186). He turns off the broadcast, saying, “God help the Hazaras now, Rahim Khan sahib” (186). Just two years later, in 1998, they would massacre the Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif.
Chapter 17 Summary
When Rahim Khan finishes his account of the last 30 years, Amir asks if Hassan is still living at the house. Instead of answering, Rahim Khan produces an envelope containing a Polaroid and a letter. The Polaroid is a portrait of Hassan and Sohrab. In the letter, Hassan recounts the difficulty and hardship of life in Kabul under the control of the Taliban. Hassan says he has been dreaming: “I dream that someday you will return to Kabul to revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you” (191).
Amir asks Rahim Khan how Hassan is. Rahim responds with another story. He tells Amir that the letter and photo are from the day before he left for Peshawar. A month after arriving in Peshawar, Rahim received a phone call from a neighbor who watched a pair of Talib officials execute Hassan and Farzana after rumors reached them that a Hazara family was living alone in Baba’s house. The officials had told Hassan to evacuate the home by sundown. When Hassan refused, he was shot in the street. Farzana was killed when she attacked them in retribution. Rahim Khan tells Amir that Sohrab is in an orphanage somewhere in Karteh-Seh and that he needs Amir to travel back to Kabul to deliver Sohrab to a Christian couple of missionaries, named Thomas and Betty Caldwell, who house and feed Afghan children orphaned by war. Initially, Amir refuses, asking why it should be him, but Rahim Khan alludes to Hassan’s attack in 1975: “I think we both know why it has to be you” (194). Rahim Khan admits that Hassan is Amir’s half-brother, conceived by Sanaubar and Baba in secret. Sohrab is Amir’s nephew. Amir becomes furious, asking whether Hassan knew. When Rahim Khan admits that he did not, Amir leaves.
Chapters 14-17 Analysis
In listening to Rahim Khan’s story, Amir is taking part in an important part of the hero myth: the gaining of knowledge from a mentor. Throughout the narrative, Rahim Khan has encouraged Amir to hone his writing skills, given valuable insights, and provided Amir’s call to action: the beckoning phone call in the novel’s first chapter. In the hero myth, the hero receives a call to action and crosses a symbolic boundary (often a river or an ocean), on the other side of which he receives the mentor’s knowledge. Through Rahim Khan, Amir has reached a new level of understanding that upsets everything he previously understood about his world. Now he understands that Hassan was not simply his friend and his family’s loyal servant but in fact his half-brother. Baba, previously the resolute paragon of masculinity who despised lies, was an adulterer who hid the birth of his son. Now, Amir has a nephew who has been orphaned in Kabul. Rahim Khan has finally given Amir all the knowledge he needs to complete his journey in literal and figurative terms.
Here, the narrative also takes its boldest steps into dialogistic construction. Dialogism is a literary technique in which a story is told with a wide and sometimes conflicting variety of points of view. There are various points in Amir’s first-person telling of the action in which Amir relates his experience through anecdotes or dreams—even the dreams of others—to make meaning. In these chapters, the text shifts to focus on Rahim Khan’s account of Afghanistan, with all of Chapter 16 told in Rahim Khan’s words. By providing this perspective, Hosseini is commenting on our relationship with The Kite Runner on a metatextual level. Throughout the narrative, Amir has been reading and forming his opinions on the world by way of secondhand accounts. The Shahnamah, Hassan’s dreams of the monster in the lake, Ivanhoe, the biography of Hitler, and Wuthering Heights have shaped Amir’s experience, just as The Kite Runner is now a part of our own experience as readers.
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