Education The differences between the education of the Hazaras and the Pashtuns are common in the novel.

The best example that show the huge gap between the poor education of the Hazaras and good one of the Pashtuns occurs at the beggining of the book, when we get to know that Amirs knwos how to write and read while Hassan, a Hazara boy, does not. Also,it is highlighted near the end of the book, when Amir reads a letter written by Hassan it shows how much time it has taken to him, who is very clever, to know how to write and read. This is due to the fact that Hazara people where servants of Pashtuns and normally could not afford a good education or simply could not because they had to work in order to get enough money to survive. Pashtuns and Hazaras Ethnicity is pretty complex in the novel. Amir and Hassan belong to different ethnic groups: Amir is a Pashtun and Hassan is a Hazara. Pashtuns are Sunni Muslims and Hazaras are Shi'a Muslims. (So ethnicity and religion are linked.) At the beggining of the book, Amir talks about how the Hazara people have been completely erased from official Afghani schoolbooks. Since the Pashtuns are in control, the Hazaras don't get much space in the official history of the country. I think that the aim of this to cover up the genocide committed by the Pashtuns against the Hazaras in the nineteenth century to take control of Afghanistan. This shows how the Pashtuns abused of power and controlled the country. Gender discrimination There aren't a lot of women in The Kite Runner. In fact, Hosseini really only uses two women in his story: Amir's wife and his mother-in-law. Further, our protagonist grows up in a household full of men, and his father embodies a robust masculinity (honor and brute strength and all that). One problem: the protagonist in The Kite Runner doesn't conform to traditional model of manhood. The novel gives an idea of the Afghan man as the one that did all the work and deserved all the attention while the women where merely there to work in the household. Religion We can observe that the theme of faith and religion is also present in The Kite Runner. At the beggining of the novel it seems like there are only two possible approaches to religion: Either you're an extremist like Amir's teacher, who believes that drinking is an offense punishable by hell, or you're liberal like the Baba, who thinks religion is not very important, silly and drinking is fun. Also, religion justifies part of the obcene acts in the book (an exmaple would be when Assef believes in Hitlers ideas to kill the woman in the stadium. However, by the end of the novel we do see the development of religious sentiment in Baba when he actually starts to believe in God when he is suffering from lung cancer. We wonder, however, if this development is enough to counter the novel's earlier depictions of religion as a justification for cruelty. Racism Racism is common all along the novel. Personally i think that the best example is when Baba goes to the doctor and when he reveals his Russians origins, Baba gets angry and leaves. He did not want to be treated by an individual of the same nationality as the people that forced him to leave Afghanistan. This example how hard was Baba to leave his home country and how

Quote=They called him "flat-nosed" because of Ali and Hassan's characteristic Hazara Mongoloid features. For years, that was all I knew about the Hazaras, that they were Mogul descendants, and that they looked a little like Chinese people. School text books barely mentioned them and referred to their ancestry only in passing. Then one day, I was in Baba's study, looking through his stuff, when I found one of my mother's old history books. It was written by an Iranian named Khorami. I blew the dust off it, sneaked it into bed with me that night, and was stunned to find an entire chapter on Hazara history. An entire chapter dedicated to Hassan's people! In it, I read that my people, the Pashtuns, had persecuted and oppressed the Hazaras. It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against the Pashtuns in the nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had "quelled them with unspeakable violence." The book said that my people had killed the Hazaras, driven them from their lands, burned their homes, and sold their women. The book said part of the reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi'a. The book said a lot of things I didn't know, things my teachers hadn't mentioned. Things Baba hadn't mentioned either. It also said some things I did know, like that people called Hazaras mice-eating, flat-nosed, load-carrying donkeys. I had heard some of the kids in the neighborhood yell those names to Hassan. (2.23)