Analysing Literary Texts (DP IB English A: Literature: HL): Revision Note

December 2001

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan. He asked me to come see him. Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn’t just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins. After I hung up, I went for a walk along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of Golden Gate Park. The early-afternoon sun sparkled on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp breeze. Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. And suddenly Hassan’s voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over. Hassan the harelipped kite runner.

I sat on a park bench near a willow tree. I thought about something Rahim Khan said just before he hung up, almost as an after thought. There is a way to be good again. I looked up at those twin kites. I thought about Hassan. Thought about Baba. Ali. Kabul. I thought of the life I had lived until the winter of 1975 came and changed everything. And made me what I am today.

Global issue (GI): The impact of displacement and migration on identity

Voice/Narration

Diction

Imagery

Structure

• Retrospective first-person narration positions Amir as someone whose identity has been shaped by a past he cannot leave behind

• Vocabulary of cold and the unburied past (“frigid”, “frozen”, “claws its way out”) conveys displacement as pain that resurfaces in the present

• Imagery of a decaying childhood landscape connects physical Afghanistan to an interior, fractured sense of self

• The non-linear opening of the novel links geographic and temporal displacement

Authorial choice

Imagery of harshness in the Afghan landscape 

How choice shapes meaning and links to GI

The decaying, cold landscape captures both the Afghanistan that Amir has left behind and the emotional condition of someone whose identity has been displaced. The imagery suggests an Afghanistan in ruins, mirroring Amir’s fractured sense of self, while the coldness conveys the emotional numbness of being cut off from one’s roots. Hosseini shows that displacement is not simply geographic but psychological: Amir is defined by what he cannot return to. Through this imagery, the global issue of migration and displacement becomes a question of how identity is reshaped, and partially lost, when home is no longer accessible.

Literary extract 1

Work

Literary extract 2

Work 2

Global issue

2–3 panels from Chapter 1, ‘The Veil’

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (in translation, French) 

Opening lines of Chapter 1, beginning, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”

George Orwell’s 1984 (English)

Impact of political systems on individual freedom

Blanche's “soft people” monologue, Scene 5

Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (English)

Firdaus' account of her marriage to Sheikh Mahmoud

Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (in translation, Arabic)

Construction of gender roles

Obierika's “knife on the things that held us together” speech, Chapter 20

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (English)

The arrival of the banana company, Chapter 12

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (in translation, Spanish)

Cultural identity and impact of colonialism