Well done for spotting this detail. Of course, the
inclusion of this first story, cited in Chapter Four of this tremendous novel, is no
accident, and it presents an ironic commentary on the plot. Note what the subject of
this first short story is:
It was a dark little tale about a man who found
a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But
even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he
found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls
piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended iwth the man sitting on a mountain of
pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain
body in his arms.
Note the
parallels between this story and Amir's situation. Both the man of the story and Amir
sacrifice the person that is dear to them for their own motive. For Amir, however, he
has no magic cup. He sacrifices Hassan for his own safety and out of a sense of his own
cowardice. He, however, like the man, is literally grief-stricken and haunted by the
sacrifice that he has made, and it takes the rest of the novel for Amir to deal with
what he did when he was a child. Thus the first story serves as an ironic foreshadowing
of what is to come and of the own sacrifice that Amir makes by letting Hassan be raped
while he watches and does nothing to preserve his own safety.
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