Nash-Boulden 1Jordan Nash-BouldenMs. JellisonH Eng 10 (809)March 13, 2014Guilt is the most powerful motivator “Guilt is anger directed at ourselves – at what we have done or not done” (Peter McWilliams). Take a look back, even for a moment, at a choice you made in your life and analyze the motivations for that decision. Maybe you gave a friend a loan because you felt guilty about not having enough money to pay for gas, or offered to take care of a neighbor's dog because you thought you would. must have been from the time he was watching your house. . This same principle applies to the characters, symbols, and plot structure of Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner, in which the main character, Amir, is tasked with repairing his broken life after witnessing, guilty, of the attack on his childhood friend. This shows that guilt can often be the most powerful motivator for the choices people make in their daily lives, no matter how gentle their "push", so to speak. Perhaps the most striking example of the influence of guilt is found in The Kite Runner's main protagonist, Amir. As a child, Amir witnesses a horrific hate crime inflicted on one of his closest friends, Hassan. Despite having the opportunity to stop the assault, Amir runs away, a sinful decision that haunts him indefinitely throughout his adolescence and into adulthood. “Finally, I ran. I ran because I was a coward...I was afraid of getting hurt...That's what I made myself believe. In fact, I longed for cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right. Nothing was free in this world of Nash-Boulden 2” (Hosseini, 77 years old). But as Amir describes it, the guilt continues to haunt him and eventually ends up in the middle of the paper......omnipresent symbol of the blue kite, the guilt is felt in the very pages of Khaled Hosseini's book. significant novel. The literary work itself is an exemplary example of the willpower it takes to overcome a guilty conscience, regardless of whether the consequences of the conscience are represented physically or emotionally in the characters. Following the path blazed by The Kite Runner through choice and consequences for thousands of readers, the novel serves to remind us that the events that occur in everyday life also remind us that no event is without consequences and that guilt can often be the most powerful motivator for those who don't have it. Works Cited Hosseini, Khaled. The kite runner. New York: Riverhead, 2003. “Famous Quotes” Print. BrainyQuote. Xplore and Web. March 30, 2014Vocabulary words: shortage, flagrant, guilty, evanescent, pernicious