In the winter, schools were closed in Kabul and the boys spent much time kite fighting. That same year, Baba got Hassan surgery to fix his harelip. As usual, Hassan stood up for Amir he got Assef to leave by aiming his slingshot at Assef's eye. One day, Amir and Hassan got into a confrontation with a boy named Assef and his two friends. Unbeknownst to the boys or anyone else, it was the first of many political changes that would eventually ruin Afghanistan as they knew it. That same night, July 17, 1973, there was a coup d'etat in Afghanistan, changing it from a monarchy to a republic. Yet when Amir wrote his first short story and read it to Hassan, it was the latter who found the plot hole in the story. Amir was proud of his literacy and lorded it over the unsuspecting, illiterate Hassan. In each generation, the boys could never truly consider themselves friends because of their class differences. Ali and Baba grew up together just like Hassan and Amir. Baba's father took Ali into his house after Ali's parents were killed in an accident. Baba wished Amir was athletic and brave like him instead of cowardly and bookish.Īmir explains how Ali and Baba knew each other. Baba did not subscribe to popular belief, preferring to cast his own opinions about issues. He was a huge and imposing man who was rumored to have wrestled a bear. Hassan would have done anything for Amir his first word was even 'Amir.' Baba was aloof and did not pay Amir much attention. He was very close to his father, Ali, who was Baba's servant.ĭespite their differences, Amir and Hassan were inseparable. Amir's closest friend, the harelipped Hassan, was also his servant and a Hazara. His father, Baba, was one of the wealthiest and most charitable Pashtun men in Kabul, where they lived in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood. We do not know anything about this event except that it still haunts him and that it involves something he did to Hassan, whom he calls 'the harelipped kite runner.' Amir takes us back to his childhood, in the final decades of the monarchy in Afghanistan. Amir, who is thus far a nameless protagonist, tells us that an event in the winter of 1975 changed his life forever. The story is narrated from the year 2002.

The kite runner novel