Remember when you were in kindergarten, if you can, and you met your first best friend. You were probably inseparable and never looked forward to the end of the school day. The relationship with the author and the addressee is like so. The reader meets the narrator and immediately places all of their trust in him/or her. Without even having the knowledge of the narrator’s character the reader is drawn to the subject at hand. While reading A Thousand Splendid Suns I had to believe everything and become the submissive reader because of how foreign the content was. The book takes place in a culture that is not well known and often times misunderstood. I would go as far as to say that even gets misrepresented. The narrator introduces you to the reality of the culture and allows the addressee to take what he wants from the text.
In the first few chapters the narrator does something that I believe tells the reader the kind of relationship that he want to develop. When Mariam is returned home by Jalil’s driver from Herat to her mother’s home the driver begins walking her to the hut. All of a sudden Mariam is stopped by the driver and redirected back to the car. Mariam still manages to see ahead and see her mother hanging from a tree. This tells me that the narrator will not be stopped or covered from experiencing everything in the text. Nothing will be to graphic or horrific for the reader to experience. It is not about the drama but about the content and reality.
as a reader I am expected to find myself face to face with this reality and gain a perspective on Mariam’s life.
Yet the author still is not reliable because other underlying themes resonate in the text. Oppression may be one of the fine themes but the cultural codes still need to be graped far into the text.
reading4awesome 
Over all I think you did a very good job on this blog. It was interesting to see what you took away from this book. I would just like to make a few comments. You mention a “culture” and how it is misrepresented and things like that. However, what is this culture? I would just clear that up a little for people who haven’t read the book or your other blogs. Also, when you talk about the author being unreliable, I feel like there is more to be said about that. Though what you said got straight to the point I feel like you could go further into it and give some examples. Unless you talked about it in another blog then I would put a link to that blog.
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I loved the usage of your opening line into this blog. Immediately I became a submissive reader to your blog. I appreciate that you described the turn of the events in the book as it related to what you were trying to convey to your readers about the text. I like your straight forward manner; however your brief post left me wanting to know more about your experience with this book and why you ”feel like you know it.”Thank you for sharing your experience with this texts!
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