A Thousand Splendid Suns Theme Essay

During the holocaust in 1944, a young Jewish boy was taken from his home and into a concentration camp in Birkenau-Auschwitz. This Jewish boy, Eliezer Wiesel had a goal to survive because his love for his father. However, after his father died, he lost the will to make an effort into regaining freedom. At the end of his ordeal as a Holocaust prisoner he succeeds in gaining his freedom, though many of his fellow prisoners did not make it. When he was interviewed later on in his life, he often said that he didn’t believe that he should have been the one to survive, because there were so many prisoners who deserved the right to life more than he did. In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini there are many themes that develop. One of the major ones is love. Like Eliezer, Mariam suffers an unfortunate past and she, too, is granted something that she believes should not have been given to a person such as herself: Love. Mariam explores different types of love throughout the novel and eventually, unconditional love finds her in just as much an arbitrary way as freedom finds Eliezer. By examining Mariam’s relationship with the past, the death of Nana, her marriage to Rasheed, and the birth of Aziza displays how the theme of …show more content…
The theme of love develops as she goes through stages of what she thought was love, losing love, then regaining a stronger type of love. Without those events, Mariam’s thoughts when she leaves the world couldn’t have been content and satisfied. This paper was written to explore how a character’s past contributions to the meaning of a novel. In this case, Mariam’s past deeply impacts the novel by developing and displaying how even with a haunting past, love can always find its way to someone’s life and alleviate misery and