Volume IV Special Issue I January 2024

Name of Author : Joshna Francis

Title of the paper : The Mechanism of Therapeutic Storytelling in Khaled Hosseinis The Kite Runner

Abstract: The paper titled The Mechanism of Therapeutic Storytelling in Khaled Hosseinis The Kite Runner, explores the consequences of therapeutic storytelling as an act of telling ones story in an attempt to better understand oneself or ones situation. Human beings are naturally predisposed to hear, to remember, and to tell stories. Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Therapeutic storytelling is the act of telling ones story for regulation of behaviour and helping with trauma. Oftentimes, these stories affect the readers in a therapeutic sense as well, helping them to view situations similar to their own through a different lens. The Kite Runner can be described as a migrant experience as it depicts disquieting memories of home far more menacing and mind shattering than the adopted country. In his The Kite Runner 2003, Khaled Hosseini uses storytelling for at least two purposes to show how the first person narrator yearns to alleviate or at least control the profoundly destructive impact of a single past experience on his adult mind and to show how, through such a recollection and reconstruction process, the narrator feels satisfied with his atonement by the end of his narration. Storytelling helps Hosseinis narrator to reconfigure his unfavourable experiences, which act both as the central concern of the narrative plot and as a shared quality weaving the central characters together. Cognitive narratologists, such as Monika Fludernik and David Herman, consider representation of experience an important basic element of narrativity or the qualities that make a narrative accepted as narrative. By focusing on his personal and human like experiences, the protagonist Amirs storytelling not only functions as a significant tool to alleviate his intense suffering, but also facilitates the readers emotional engagement in Hosseinis story world. This article based on therapeutic storytelling focuses on to analyse how stories that are expressed in a metaphorical way to make a strong connection with inner reality. It tries to unravel the question of how stories can assist in healing, and can have the capacity to be life-changing, if carefully chosen both in terms of purpose and timing.

Keywords : Narration, therapeutic storytelling, migrant experience, trauma, representation of experience.

DOI :

Page Number : 42-47