Look of the Lamb

          This novel feeds off of the past events in all the characters lives. Without certain happy and tragic events mentioned, some details wouldn’t connect or make sense to the plot of the story. One symbol that I was able to link to each the beginning, middle and end of the story was the lamb or sheep. At the beginning of the book, there is talk about the cultures tradition of sacrificing a lamb or a sheep in celebration of a Muslim festival. In our course text this resembles the sin or the world or the sacrifice without blemish. In the middle of the book during the time of Hassan’s rape, Amir refers to the look on his face similar to a sheep/lamb. Also, at the end of the book Amir finds that same look on Sorab’s face. In these cases, the lamb represents gentleness, young innocence, and purity. The sheep represents blind, helplessness and unintelligent. I feel like the time when Amir saw Hassan’s face would more so resemble a sheep because of the helplessness state that he was in at the time. Sorab appeared to look for like a lamb because he was so young and innocent.
          Both Hassan and Sohrab are innocents who are figuratively sacrificed by being raped, but these sacrifices have very different meanings. In Hassan’s case, Amir sacrifices him for the blue kite. But in Sohrab’s case, Amir is the one who stops his sexual abuse. In this context, sacrifice is portrayed as the exploitation of an innocent.



           These innocent and helpless looks made Amir feel a huge amount of guilt because he took all the blame upon himself. With this symbol you could link it to torture as mentioned in the lectures in class. Torture and torment must be consistent. One part of the book in particular stands out to me and that is when Amir goes back to Kabul and is at the stadium and watches two people get stoned to death. The fact that they make it such a public event is scary and disturbing. The picture to the left is very similar and has the same aspects of torture and torment that people experienced in this country at the time. The only difference is the victim is getting beheaded From the start of the book, Assef tormented and tortured from start to finish and not only to Amir and Hassan but also to Sorab and other members of the community. I wonder if these evil actions from Assef is his way of seeking out suffering as a path to God? Maybe he views all pain positively.

          The only way Amir could escape these constant looks of helplessness from people close to him was to find redemption from evil and to overcome the guilt he felt his whole life. Also relating to this is the video we watched in class called The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib at the beginning when the government does an experiment to test how many volts a human can endure before death. It is just unecessary torture and evil.