TOPIC C

          In the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseni, Laila is forced to contend with her past and future when she ends up marrying Rasheed because she is told that her love, Tariq, the boy with the one leg was killed.
          Hosseini makes Laila a very confident girl and she is given all the privileges of a normal free girl. She was allowed to go to school and even hang out with boys even though that wasn’t usually allowed since she was a girl. Tariq and Laila were really close and “he’d playfully whacked the back of her head” (107). This shows that they are really close friends and her parents gave her the freedom that she normally would have been denied. She is just a normal girl who goes to school has friends plays with them, has fun and tries to live a normal life, but Rasheed changed all of that. Rasheed told her that Even when you were little, when you were running with that cripple, you thought you were so clever, with your books and poems” (283).” He hated her and he couldn’t stand the freedom that she had so he oppressed her and beat her. He did whatever he could to make sure that she did not get the same life she use to have and even had someone lie to her and tell her that Tariq was dead so she would marry him. Which she did, only because she was pregnant with Tariq’s little girl. Laila no longer had the same life because of how Rasheed kept her and the expectations that he had.
            In the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, Laila has to give up all of her freedoms from the past only to survive. In order to display the theme of survival Hosseini shows how a normal little girl is willing to give up her entire life on the sole basis of a lie and desperation.