In this research, I aim to examine the visible and invisible representation of violence in Khaled Hosseini's three novels, The Kite Runner (2003), A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), and And the Mountains Echoed (2013). Significantly, I will analyze different types of violence in these novels through narratological approaches. I will also inspect the hidden and untold scenes in the novels and the role of trauma in violence representation in the narratives. Furthermore, I will deduce how invisible violence paves the way to a visible one.
I am writing on the works of Hosseini as there is little reception on his novels in his country and Anglophone countries. There are newspaper and magazine reviews, but the critical studies are minimal. Through my researches, no monograph appeared on his works. It is essential to talk about Hosseini's works on violence representation as it is a cultural memory processing that is important for conflict resolution. By reading Hosseini's novels, I try to find the paradigm of violence representation because his works employ a multiphased of violence representation. This paradigm will incorporate the notions of narratology, trauma theory, and Johan Galtung's violence triangle, to test the representation of violence in Hosseini's first three published novels.
In the first and second chapters, I will survey Khaled Hosseini's life and works; discuss background concepts related to trauma, conflicts as side facets of violence, and narratology. I will identify some key concepts and build the theoretical background to later test to analyze the following chapters' selected novels. Further, the first two chapters will include a summary of conflict studies alongside various types of violence, peculiarly the modal of the violence triangle defined by Johan Galtung. At the end of the second chapter, I will also explore the narratological modes of the unnarrated and disnarrated. Following the introduction, I will dedicate three chapters to analyze Hosseini's novels A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Kite Runner, and And the Mountains Echoed. Finally, the last chapter will conclude my research on the representation of violence in Khaled Hosseini's three novels. Then this thesis's novelty comes to existence naming it literary violence triangle. Violence has an invisible level, but there is another sub-level underneath the invisible violence. Trauma is the sub-level that causes violence. Violence causes trauma, but the main issue to consider is the reason behind the violence, and trauma comes first. To address violence, first, the unearthed traumas should be explored to understand the reasons behind the violence, and this is important to portray the whole picture to see how violence functions. Following the exploration of trauma studies, narratology has the leading role in elaborating this thesis to study unaddressed trauma and violence issues. To build on that, it is also about the novels' hidden knowledge that the narrator does not transfer to the reader purposely or unconsciously. Testing the narratological method of disnarration and unnaration on Hosseini's novels will allow me to look at the representation of violence in-depth, including the undressed hidden traumas, which are the main reasons for the creation of represented violence in the fictional works
