Intertexuality between The Kite Runner and Atonement

One thing that struck me about Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner was its sometimes uncanny resemblance to Atonement. The Kite Runner's main character is a priveliged young boy, Amir who grows up in 1970's Afghanistan. His closest companion is his servant Hassan, also a boy of his age. Amir, shares many similarities with everyone's favorite character, young Briony Tallis from Atonment. On the surface they are both young teenagers largely ignored and underappreciated by their parents. They both aspire to be writers of fiction. Amir and Briony both write stories in their youth. That is not enough however, to say that the two texts are similar. But when you dig deeper you start to see all the similarites between the novels. Briony is writing a piece of literature nearly eighty years later to make up for a sin that she was too cowardice to make up for. Amir is telling the story of his actions twenty some years after a similarly awful sin in an attempt to atone for his sin. Their stories are connected by a desire to finally atone for a mistake made in the cowardice of youth that ruined the lives of everyone around them. Briony saw a rape and blamed an innocent man because she believed that man to be a predator due to his love for her sister. Despite her almost immediate doubts she continues to assert that she SAW Robbie rape the girl. Robbie ends up being killed because of this, and Briony can never bring herself to apologize to him and Cecilia. Amir sees Hassan being raped by three boys, and doesn't step in to help Hassan. He is guilt ridden by his mistake, but it too scared to admit it to anyone, and it is not until twenty years later and Hassan's death-again, similar to Atonement in that it was caused through Amir being too scared to admit his mistake-that he finally tries to make up for it. What is the significance of Hosseini's allusion to Atonment? I'm not sure that I know for sure. Several of the same themes are in both novels. The stories of Amir and Briony certainly convey the theme of the human race's inability to atone for our mistakes. Perhaps he was trying to tell us that a young Amir struggled with the same immaturity issues that Briony had. In a larger sense, is the allusion to Atonement and its narrator a clue that Amir's act of atonment may not be all it's made out to be? If Briony can lie to the reader about her attempts to atone with Robbie and Cecilia, could Hosseini be saying that despite what his narator said happened, Amir wasn't able to rescue Hassan's son from the clutches of Assef? Or even worse, he could be saying that Amir never went into Kabul to rescue Sobhar. Whatever the case may be, the similarities between the two texts is striking and creates interesting parralells and possibilities