Kite Runner Women

For the majority of the Westerners, the women of Afghanistan are faceless and oppressed burqa-clad victims of the Islamic and patriarchal society. This stereotype was created by the Western media during the USA invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This image ignores the true personalities of Afghan women, their bravery and their capability to survive the war and restore their rights. However, through exploring the female heroines in the traditional Afghan folktales as well as in the novels written by Afghan-born authors it becomes evident that women of Afghanistan are courageous, intelligent and cunning - without these traits they would not be able to survive.
Khaled Hosseini (1965-) is an Afghan-American novelist and physician. His family moved to San Jose, California in 1980 and in 2003 his first novel The Kite Runner was published. Based on this novel, the film with the same name was released in 2007. All three of Hosseini’s novels were bestsellers; A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) spent 103 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, 15 of them at number one (Wikipedia). The adaptation of A Thousand Splendid Suns was made by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in February 2017 (A.C.T.). Hosseini currently lives in …show more content…
Female characters of the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns have been discussed by such scholars as Abdul Wali Yawari, Alice Ligoria, Azam Kazemiyan and Ryzki Indra Wicaksono. The researchers focused mainly on the image of Afghan women and their issues. Alexandra Andrews redefined Afghan women as modern archetypes. In Estonia, Laura Lobjakas from Tallinn University analysed the novel from an ecofeminist perspective. However, there have been no attempts to analyse the characters of this novel as female tricksters. The purpose of the present thesis is to contribute to the study done on this novel and to analyse the characters from a new