Titanic In A Thousand Splendid Suns

Strong, enormous, unbreakable, unsinkable- these powerful images describe the Titanic, once an unbreakable ship that lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean today. Khaled Hosseini uses the Titanic movie in A Thousand Splendid Suns. In this novel, Hosseini relates Rasheed to the Titanic to represent entrapment, degradation, and control of Mariam’s and Laila’s lives: yet like the Titanic, Rasheed is also vulnerable. Rasheed verbally entraps Laila and Mariam in A Thousand Splendid Suns just like the Titanic entrapped the lives of the people on the ship. Rasheed’s first wife died and Mariam was the second wife of him. Mariam’s life during that time had verbal entrapment everywhere she looked. On one occasion Mariam cooked some hard rice that was not good to …show more content…
This made her feel as if she could not bring anything to the marriage. To know that the person you married, which was by force and not desire, would put you down for rice being too hard and to go as far as making someone chew pebbles is depressing. Mariam had to feel hopelessness in getting away from the verbal entrapment of Rasheed. Laila married Rasheed because he viewed himself strong and persuasive like the Titanic but in the end failed to live up to these standards. In the first beginnings of their relationships, she was high and lifted up by him. For Mariam this was not so. Mariam was compared to a car. Rasheed said that if “she were a car, she would be a Volga” (222). How could someone say this to a person? Should a wife have to deal with this criticism from a husband? At this point, Mariam had been trying to do all of her chores and everything she was supposed to do such as: cooking for Rasheed, doing laundry, and cleaning the kitchen. Mariam felt verbally entrapped because she could not do or act the way the unbreakable and almighty Rasheed wanted her to. All he like to do was remind her that “[she] was a harami”