Isolation In Aldous Huxleys Brave New World And The Kite...

We all deal with alienation, both internal and external, throughout our lives: it is an unavoidable condition that universally afflicts all humans. However, oftentimes we can alienate ourselves from other people more than is necessary, putting a divide between us and the rest of humanity by no fault but our own. Both John and Amir in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner face great internal struggles with alienation throughout their whole lives, many times making things worse for themselves than is needed, and forging their characters by fire; yet the natures of their hardships are inherently different, leading the protagonists down two disparate paths: one to personal triumph and the other to tragedy. John†¦show more content†¦In the strange other words they said that Linda was bad; they called her names he did not understand, but that he knew were bad names. One day they sang a song about her, again and again. He threw stones at them. They threw back; a sharp stone cut his cheek. The blood wouldn’t stop; he was covered with blood† ( Huxley 129). John and Linda are different enough from the rest of the Reservation that they are shunned, ridiculed, and even physically harmed for their—mainly Linda’s—foreign cultural practices. Although he was more or less a Reservation native, John could not find happiness and a sense of belonging there because of his mother, because of the fact that he was from the â€Å"Other Place,† because of the fact that he even existed. Amir’s struggles, on the other hand, are of an inherently different nature from John’s in that they are internal and Amir is more directly responsible for the ca use of his alienation. Amir, having witnessed the rape of his childhood best friend and servant Hassan at a young age, failing to help him, and not telling anyone about it, bears the weight of his sins throughout a large portion of his childhood and adult life. Amir struggles greatly with what he has done in the weeks and months after the rape, leading him to emotionally and physically harm Hassan even more than he has already been