Assignment #2 | Topic A

In the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, Hosseini tells a story about two women, Mariam and Laila who take on lives filled with struggle and pain. He uses many literary devices such as imagery and diction to help the reader understand the point in the book that women in this book are inferior and almost don't matter. Imagery falls into play all throughout the novel and also at the end of part one. Mariam prepares food for Rasheed and he ends up unhappy with it, "His powerful hands clasped her jaw. He shoved two fingers into her mouth and pried it open, then forced the cold, hard pebbles into it. Mariam struggled against him, mumbling, but he kept pushing the pebbles in, his upper lip in a sneer. . . Then he was gone, leaving Mariam to spit out pebbles, blood, and the fragments of two broken molars." The phrases, "powerful hands clasped her jaw" and "pried it open" helps the reader better understand what's going on, it lets the reader know how intense of a struggle Mariam was undergoing. In chapter 47, Hosseini uses diction to reveal the severity of the beatings Rasheed would do to the two women characters. "Laila ducked and managed to land a punch across his ear, which made him spit a curse and pursue her even more relentlessly. He caught her, threw her up against the wall, and struck her with the belt again and again, the buckle slamming against her chest, her shoulder, her raised arms, drawing blood wherever it struck."When the author uses the phrase, "relentlessly" it implies that Rasheed had no intent on giving in and if anything he was more forceful than ever in that moment. Words like "struck", "ducked" and "slamming" gives the reader the idea that this was no calm fight, there was fighting back; there was a frenzy; almost hysteria.

Using these devices, Hosseini projects the reality within Afghanistan, that things like this really happen, that women are objects and not human beings. It alarms the readers about the outstanding domestic abuse that is so normal to many of the women in Afghanistan.