Truth is opposed to lies: innocence to guilt; freedom to tyranny; cowardice to bravery; optimistic, fair-minded America to melancholic, self-destructive Afghanistan; and action to the rather slippery and unsatisfactory activity of writing. Encompassing all is the contrast of good and evil, invoked at the start by Rahim Khan's call to Amir, urging him to return to Afghanistan, where "there is a way to be good again" (2, emphasis in original). … Direct, plain language once more adds to the power of this retrospective rite-of-passage novel. Amir tells us: "I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975" (1).

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 246