Khaled Hossneini's A Thousand Splendid Suns: A Study of Women’s Capacity of Grappling with Suffering

Abstract

Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) is a tale of two heroic female characters whose spirits are still shining despite the miserable life and the dimmest rays of hope they have. This novel portrays and renders a sense of what daily life, especially life of women, is like in Kabul --both before and during the restrictive and destructive reign of the Taliban. As a humanitarian and activist, Hosseini wants to depict the tragedies that the Afghan women had endured, the discrimination and violence that they had suffered in the contemporary Afghan society. This motivated him to write this novel to focus on women's suffering and endurance simultaneously due to the multiple dominations of the patriarchal society. Each part in the novel deals with new pattern of hardships and torture, which have their roots either in childhood, like Mariam's miserable childhood, or in war and death of the loved ones, as Laila's suffering when losing her family in the war. As the theme of suffering and endurance is common and recurrent in A Thousand Splendid Suns, the current study examines the ability of the major characters to accept and cope with their sufferings and struggles, whether they are physical or emotional, and even regulate it. It tries to find an answer to the question of how the characters have the capacity to grapple with their anguish. As the study adopts the concept of suffering as the frame of analyzing characters’ ability to grapple with the suffering and hardships of women in the eastern society, it is, thus, going to identify the meaning of suffering, shedding light on its types as a concept and its forms as an object. Then it uses this concept as a means to investigate and study the suffering of Mariam and Laila in A Thousand Splendid Sun.