The Kite Runner: Foreshadowing

"I thought of the life I had lived until the winter of 1975 came along and changed everything. And made me what I am today." (page 2)

From the very first chapter of The Kite Runner, I was able to recognize Hosseini's love of using foreshadowing; although he begins his novel with a line of foreshadowing, I felt that the one with the most gravity is the last sentence in the first chapter. Throughout the entire first half of the novel, Hosseini writes using this technique in order to keep the reader in great suspense, such as the above excerpt. He ends the chapter with this phrase and piques the reader's interest as to what the narrator is referring to. When I read this line, I knew that the this change would be a drastic one for the narrator because of the dark way the sentence is written. It caused me much intrigue and made me want to keep reading to discover what had changed for the narrator. Employing the use of foreshadowing causes The Kite Runner to move quickly; Hosseini writes with the intent of causing this suspense at the end of nearly every chapter, and oftentimes, he uses it in the middle of chapters too. Amir doles out bits and pieces of information about himself that the reader begins to put together to answer the questions that were formed in their minds by this very first statement. The foreshadowing technique creates an opportunity to keep the audience in the dark, but cause them to remain very interested at the same time.