Biblio Breakdown: A Thousand Splendid Suns, Part Three

Exploring place as person and dramatic irony in a historical context.

In the third and final installment of this Biblio Breakdown for A Thousand Splendid Suns, we’ll discuss setting as character before we advance into an exploration of dramatic irony.

Setting as Character

In other posts, we've covered the importance of setting as character more generally, but one dimension to setting that is often overlooked (including by yours truly) is time. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, however, Hosseini puts on a masterclass in the use of time as character (and a generally antagonizing character, at that).

We as people are shaped by the times in which we live, and our characters should be no different. As the perspective characters in A Thousand Splendid Suns grow and struggle throughout their lives, the city of Kabul—and Afghanistan more broadly—does as well.

In the earliest parts of the book, we are party to an Afghanistan with progressive urban leanings, but as Afghanistan and our main characters endure the overthrow of its leadership in a communist coup followed by Soviet occupation followed by an attempt to establish a democracy followed by a civil war followed by the seizure of control by the Taliban and then their eventual overthrow in the 2000s (and I may have missed a step or two in there), our characters' daily lives are impacted immensely by the ongoing turmoil, loss of life, and the sociopolitical tendencies of those in power.

The one constant throughout, however, is that regardless of who runs the show in Kabul, Afghanistan (or at least the bits of it we see in the book) remained an oppressive place for women. The rules may have changed at the fringes, and stability as well, but women are almost universally regarded as second-class citizens, a primary focus of the book.

The lesson we take away is this: for those of us writing fiction of any kind—but especially historical fiction—the times in which our characters flourish (or fail) should not be disregarded. They, too, can make the world feel more lived in and fill the role of an additional antagonist or ally in the proper context.

Exercise: Think about not where, but when your work in progress takes place. What is your main character's relationship to the times in which he or she lives? Do they feel very much a part of the zeitgeist or rather detached from it? Even if they do feel detached, why? How can their attachment or detachment from their world's goings-on help define their journey and your theme as the author?

Once you've answered these questions for your main character, consider them for your supporting cast as well—they, too, surely have opinions and reactions of their own to share!

Dramatic Irony

Dramatic irony is another topic we've broached in previous posts, but A Thousand Splendid Suns provides such a salient example of it that I have to mention it as part of this series.