A Portray Of The Protagonist Amir By The Author, Khaled Hosseini, In The Novel “The Kite Runner”

A round character is defined by their detailed characteristics. Round characters have fully various personalities, desires, backgrounds, and motivations, they often demonstrate changes through their personality which occur through self vs self-conflict which defines the characters personality.

At the start of the novel Amir is seen as an egoistic, selfish character who is envious of how his father, Baba, would praise their servant, Hassan. This is because Hassan has traits that Baba wants his own son Amir to have, for example courage and boldness. Amir’s jealousy is shown when he says "I'd change my mind and ask for a bigger and fancier kite, Baba would buy it for me - but then he'd buy it for Hassan too. Sometimes I wish he wouldn't do that. I wish he'd let me be the favorite.” (Hosseini, 89). The day of Hassan’s birthday. Baba had called Hassan to give him his birthday present. Baba’s birthday present for Hassan was a plastic surgeon to fix Hassan’s harelip. Amir was envious that Baba would spend extreme amount of money for Hassan’s birthday.

These examples show the jealousy that Amir feels towards Hassan, Amir is a round character as later on in the novel we can see he starts thinking of how he treated Hassan, and starts feeling guilt. Amir spends the rest of his life trying to make up for all the times he betrayed his friend, Hassan. This forces Amir to take a trip back to Afghanistan and find sohrab, and save him before it's too late. Amir finally gets to meet Sohrab for the first time, and tells him about the lifestyle in America “Sohrab, I can’t give you your old life back, I wish to God I could. But I can take you with me. That was what I was coming in the bathroom to tell you. You have a visa to go to America, to live with me and my wife. It’s true. I promise” (Hosseini, 374).

Amir has rescued Sohrab from the foster life and decided to adopt him and take him back to America with him. Amir sees an opportunity to redeem himself by adopting Sohrab. He did not help Hassan when he was getting raped, but now Amir has a chance to help Hassan's son. Amir changes by becoming a courageous man that ends up doing something special for his close childhood friend, instead of the jealous boy he was when he was young.