Conclusion

Khaled Hosseini uses diction, tone, and imagery to communicate Afghanistan's social issues on servants' illiteracy and rigidness of class structure. By using the word “illiterate” to describe Hassan and other Hazaras in the quote, "Hassan would grow up illiterate like Ali and most Hazaras" (28), Amir reveals that illiteracy is a commonality among servants. However, Amir mainly uses this word to highlight the fact that Hassan doesn't know how to read and write, not that he is an uneducated person. In this context, being “uneducated” and “illiterate” are two different concepts because although Hassan is illiterate, he is educated in the art of being a good servant. So, in this sense, Hosseini may have chosen to use “illiterate” to stress how Hazaras have limited knowledge and little opportunity to find high-paying jobs because they don’t know how to read and write, which shows the lack of social mobility in Afghanistan.  Not only is there a lack of social mobility, but upper class people, like Amir, think that it is a laughable matter for a Hazara to be anything more than a servant. In the quote, “after all, what use did a servant have for the written word” (28), Amir has used a ludicrous tone, through the phrases "after all" and "what use did," to show his incapability to believe that a Hazara can be anything other than a servant because being a servant doesn’t require the person to know words. More importantly, Hosseini has used Amir’s ludicrous tone to reveal that people are expected to stay in the social class that they belonged to, which shows how people can’t move up the social ladder. Moreover, the social issue of a rigid class structure is further supported by the quote, "perhaps even the moment [Hassan] had been conceived in Sanaubar’s unwelcoming womb" (28), which depicts an image of a helpless, embryonic Hassan that can't change his fate. This quote basically illustrates how each person is born into the class that they belong to. Since Hassan is born as a Hazara and a son of a servant, he can't grow up to hold a position higher than that of a servant. Ultimately, through the use of different literary devices, Hosseini has explained the different social issues - such as illiteracy and the inflexible class system - that haunt the lower class people of Afghanistan. However, these social issues do not only exist in Afghanistan; there are other countries around the world that face similar problems, especially when it comes to the country’s illiteracy rate. 

The Kite Runner, Passage Two (Page 27-28)

After school, Hassan and I met up, grabbed a book, and trotted up a bowl-shaped hill just north of my father’s property in Wazir Akbar Khan. There was an old abandoned cemetery atop the hill with rows of unmarked headstones and tangles of brushwood clogging the aisles. Seasons of rain and snow had turned the iron gate rusty and left the cemetery’s low white stone walls in decay. There was a pomegranate tree near the entrance to the cemetery. One summer day, I used one of Ali’s kitchen knives to carve our names on it: “Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul.” Those words made it formal: the tree was ours. After school, Hassan and I climbed its branches and snatched its bloodred pomegranates. After we’d eaten the fruit and wiped our hands on the grass, I would read to Hassan.

Sitting cross-legged, sunlight and shadows of pomegranate leaves dancing on his face, Hassan absently plucked blades of grass from the ground as I read him stories he couldn’t read for himself. That Hassan would grow up illiterate like Ali and most Hazaras had been decided the minute he had been born, perhaps even the moment he had been conceived in Sanaubar’s unwelcomingwomb—after all, what use did a servant have for the written word? But despite his illiteracy, or maybe because of it, Hassan was drawn to the mystery of words, seduced by a secret world forbidden to him. I read him poems and stories, sometimes riddles—though I stopped reading those when I saw he was far better at solving them than I was. So I read him unchallenging things, like the misadventures of the bumbling Mullah Nasruddin and his donkey. We sat for hours under that tree, sat there until the sun faded in the west, and still Hassan insisted we had enough daylight for one more story, one more chapter.