There is a Way to be Good Again: A Voyage from the Ontological Self to the Responsible One in Khaled Hosseinis The Kite Runner: A Levinasian Reading

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner provides a great deal of ethical insight for its readers. This novel draws attention to the issue of ethics in Afghan society. In fact, The Kite Runner is a good example to be scrutinized in the light of the continental French thinker, Emmanuel Levinas. His ethics gives priority to the Other over the Self and considers the ethical responsibility for the Other as the most crucial element in reconstructing subjectivity. Taking Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, and regarding the ethical dimension of the encounter between the Self and the Other in Levina's viewpoint, especially his notions of face, responsibility and subjectivity, this paper sheds light on the specificity of The Kite Runner as a challenging literary text with the ethical issues which provides a context in which the hypothesis that salvation resides in fragmentation of one's own Self by putting an end to one's self-interested efforts, breaking out of the reductive and totalitarian structures of an ontological thought, taking infinite responsibility for the Other, and ultimately moving beyond the Other could be assessed.