Literary Representations of the Horrors and Brutalities of Armed Conflict: A Study of War Imagery in Khalid Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Abstract

Afghanistan is known for its long history of war and conflict. Since the invasion of the Soviets, the country has been facing subsequent invasions from other powers as well as internal conflicts among different religious sects and political groups for gaining power. Due to this history of turmoil and conflicts, the people of Afghanistan were severely affected. Many of them were displaced and migrated to other countries while those who remained suffered from the horrors and brutalities of war. It also caused them great physical, economic, and mental losses. During this era of absurdity, mental depression, and chaos writers felt the urge to express new experiences and realities in new ways, and thus war became a dominant theme in the writings of many Afghan writers. One among such leading authors is Khalid Husseini who has realistically and boldly reflected the life of Afghans during wartime and brutal realities of war in his novels. The current study probes into the author’s dealing with the war subject through the use of imagery in his novel ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ published in 2007. The study's main objective is to highlight how imagery has been a useful tool in the hand of the novelist to depict the brutalities and horrors of war. For this purpose, a qualitative research approach is adopted, including an introspective and contrapuntal reading of different quotations and excerpts from the novel in light of the theoretical framework adopted by Cuddon (1994). The key findings of the study are that imagery has been a useful tool in the hands of the writer for revealing the horrors and brutalities of war such as; mental trauma and chaos of characters, the portrayal of War Driven Landscape, nostalgia for the lost Cultural Heritage, separation of the loved ones and disintegration of social fabrics and physical violence against the civilians.