Lesson 17/10

So, chapter 22....
Two areas of focus for today's post: Assef's character and how the chapter is written ('especially the end bit').

Assef's character:
'John Lennon glasses'- Western reference shows the out of place wealth of the Taliban- the real Afghans are poor and suffering.
'marks on his forearm'- Assef is obviously frequently abuses drugs, which once again shows the hypocrisy of the Taliban, because their aims are supposed to be to help make the country pure.
'You don't understand the meaning of the word 'liberating'.... let the bullets fly... breathtaking.'- the reader is disgusted by how excited Assef gets as he talks about killing people. This shows his character as malicious and insane.
'Would you like to see my boy?'- likes the thought of having ownership of a child- perverse.
'His hands slid down the child's back'- this makes the reader uncomfortable as we know Assef  is not phased by sexually abusing children.
'Amir jan'- the use of jan here is ironic because he's addressing Amir in a fond manner when he obviously wants to kill him. This makes Assef all the more frightening as we remember how polite he appeared to Baba when he was younger, when actually he is planning evil things. He also seems to be toying with Amir here.
'Ethnic cleansing. I like it'- reminds us of the young Assef aspiring to Hitler's actions- now he's become very much like Hitler in character.


All the quotes above help to describe what Assef is like, and so throughout the chapter we learn more and more about what he's been up to since 1975- and we learn more and more that he has become even more evil and dangerous since then.

So, the end bit of the chapter:
Foreshadowing is used by Hosseini in Amir's narrative as we find out something important happens at the end of the chapter- 'I remember... the end of course... I always will.' This creates tension and suspense, and later on so does 'Then the end. That, I'll take to my grave:' which makes the reader want to read on. What actually happens is pretty shocking and very graphic- for example 'vitreous fluid' is mentioned, and the reader is prepared for this because something even more major than Amir being beaten has to happen for him to actually manage to escape. Hosseini has already shown that Amir will escape with his life, because Hosseini has used a jump forwards in time to tell us Amir survives- 'I think I gave him a good fight'. The way that Amir escapes is pretty unexpected- Sohrab saves him. the point when Amir speaks of 'Sohrab's little hand in mine' shows the reader the horrific things children of Afghanistan have to endure, but what I find most interesting about this sentence is that Sohrab doesn't ever show this much affection to Amir again... This shows how desperate Sohrab was to escape.