Theme q Nolan, Larry, Emily

[Nolan Cook]

With Amir coming back to destroyed Afghanistan he "suddenly, for the first time since we had crossed the border, I felt like I was back. After all these years, I was home again, standing on the soil of my ancestors" ; Yet when Farid proclaims to Amir, "You've always been a tourist here, you just didn't know it", we're left with the question what's Amir's connection to his culture and this wasteland of destruction that local's used to call Afghanistan?

[ginny...@gmail.com]

Amir was always connected more to the culture than the country. He treated Hassan like dirt and allowed himself to believe it was okay to walk away from his rape because "he was just a Hazara." This was an ideal of his culture that'd been taught to him by society around him. In reality, he did not see much of Afghanistan and did not share the overall culture of the country. What Amir missed was his colony, not the country. 

[Miraya Mathews]

Amir felt like he had a grip on who he was in regard to his culture and his country, based on the environment he grew up in. When he went back to get Sohrab he saw what people experienced on a daily basis before the Taliban took over and that same situation was emphasized after. Amir realized that because of his upbringing and his more privileged life than most others he had a skewed perspective of the Afghanistan that everyone else had lived with. His journey through Afghanistan was like a him experiencing Afghanistan from a different perspective than what he knew as a child, the way the "other half" lived. After his journey it left Amir with greater knowledge of what Afghanistan was and is now.