Regret and guilt are two things that will always come back to haunt someone.

In both novels, The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini and The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene, a character makes a certain decision that, in the end, will define and affect him for the rest of his life. With Amir,he is having regrets of witnessing his best friend Hassan getting raped ina a back alley and not doing anything about it. For the whisky priest, he was running away from the authorities because of his fear for death. Amir is acting on his pain of regret by risking his life for another. For the priest, he is turning back to have his biggest fear meet him face to face. Both change their mindset which in the end helps them for the better. Through the failures and the triumphs of Amir and the whisky priest, it was a series of minor incidents that made Amir and the whisky priest theheroes of the novels, but Amir being the most outstanding of the two. The priest in The Power and the Glory, or the whisky priest as he refers to himself, is a man on the run from the police because the police believes that the church exploits the poor. In the beginning of the novel the reader might find that the whisky priest is going against Gods will, which is giving his life for the faith. In the novel, the whisky priest meets up with his daughter. The whisky priest is aware of the sin that he committed by having a child, but at the moment his live for his daughter is so strong that he does not regret it (176). What makes the whisky priest a true hero are his acts of kindness for the mestizo. Even though through the novel it seems as if the mestizo is an untrustworthy person, the whisky priests stays true to what he stands for and helps him out even when he is an obstacle in the way. The most heroic act of the whisky priest is even after he almost entirely escaped from the authorities, the whisky priest decides to accompany the mestizo across the border back into the state in which the authorities are

searching for him (43). He did this all to hear a dying mans confession. This showed the audience that the whisky priest was willing to be caught by the authorities and maybe killed just to hear a mans last words. He stayed true to his word through out the novel, and even with mistakes along the way, the whisky priest was a true hero that many people can relate to. In The Kite Runner, Amir is a character with a privileged upbringing who tries to redeem himself of the large mistakes he make as a child. Soon after Amir won the kite flying contest in the city of Kabul, Hassan promised he would run the blue kite, the last kite in the sky, for Amir (Grahame Greene (67). As Hassan was backed into an alley by the bully Assef and raped, Amir was secretly watching this event take place. Amir had the decision to stick up for his friend and risk whatever would happen to him or walk away and do nothing and stand in the face of guilt for the rest of his life. In the end, Amir ran (77). He ran away because he was scared and being selfish as if Hassan meant nothing to him and was not a major part of his life. Through the novel, Hassan always seemed to be the bigger man in the story. Another example of this is when Amir decided to stealthily sneak the watch, which Baba gave him as a birthday present, under Hassans pillow (104). When Amir pretends to not know where the watch is, Baba becomes angry. Then Hassan speaks up and claims that he stole it from Amirs room. With Amir being a bystander to this conversation, he just watched as Baba nagged at Hassan about why he would do such a thing while Amir did not say a word and witnessed Hassan again take the fall for Amir (105). This poor decision led to awkwardness between Amir with Hassan until Hassan decided to leave the house and live on his own. For as long as Amir lived, he would remember how he let down his friend in the heat of the moments and this

would come back to haunt him for the rest of his life. As the audience would agree, Amir had some mistakes in life, or ,in his case, some major failures that he will never be able to directly change. But as the novel moves along, the reader finally finds out how Amir has matured and what his true identity is. Wherever Amir went, the thought of how he never stuck up for Hassan through his childhood was always following him around. Little did he know, he would soon again have the chance to, in a small way, redeem himself. Now living in the United States, and little after Amir published his first book, he received a call from Rham Khan asking him to return to Kabul as he was sick and needed much help (191). After arriving to Kabul and having a long conversation to catch up with Rham Khan, Amir was informed that Hassan and himself were step-brothers, Baba being the father of both (222). Also, unfortunately Rhan Khan told Amir about how Hassan as his wife had been shot in the street by the Taliban and left an only child behind. His name was Soyrab (219). Hearing this news, Amir knew what he had to do. For once he had to stay loyal for Hassan and give back to the only thing he had left of Hassan, which was his son. Amir risked his life to bring Soyrab back to the United States with him. He snuck his way through and around the Taliban just to get to Soyrab. He searched the orphanage and then found out his only way to unite with Soyrab was meeting directly with the Taliban. At the meeting unfortunately discovered that the leader of the Taliban was Assef, the boy who raped Hassan as a child (281). Assef reminded Amir of the unfinished business he had with Amir and stated that Amir could keep the boy if he beat him in a fight (287). This is the moment where Amirs life flashed before his life. He realized he was sorry for all the cruel things he did to Hassan. He was willing to do anything to give back to Hassan and

now he just had to get through Assef, who at the moment was putting on his brass knuckles (288). Later, Amir woke up in the hospital realizing that he had Soyrab at his side. He risked his life to save Soyrab, and in the end it paid off knowing that he eventually in a way returned the favor to Hassan.