Journey Towards Self-realization in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner : A Comparative Study

The Prolific South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001) and the promising Afghan writer, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) belong to New Literatures in English. The main characters in these two novels undertake their journey from their native place to foreign country in pursuit of happiness, place, prosperity and self-realization. This research paper attempts to make a comparison between Gordimer’s The Pickup and Hosseini’s The Kite Runner in terms of the journey undertaken by the protagonists Abdu and Julie of The Pickup and Amir of The Kite Runner though these two novels are set in a different background.

Journey has been a recurring theme found in New Literatures in English. The journey is a powerful symbol often used to represent a character's adventure leading to selfrealization. Moving from one locale to another is a common form of journey. But to creative writers, the journey becomes a metaphorical representation of life. Gordimer and Hosseini successfully takeup journey metaphors and used in their novels to express notions of change and choice, discovery and departure, and search and struggle. As the critic Stephen Hutchinson so succinctly states it, "Life's 'journey' appears to be one of those universal metaphors whose 'diverse intonation' reveals a great deal about how people in different places, times, and persuasions characterize and valorize their own being in the world" (72).
Both Abdu and Amir hail from third world countries. In The Pickup, Abdu's real name is Ibrahim Ibu Musa and an unnamed Arab state is his country of birth. Amir also belongs to one of the Islamic countries as he is born and brought up in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Abdu is a graduate in Economics but his country fails to provide him with a suitable job to support his poor family. He criticizes his country because the politicians help the rich from getting richer and the poor becoming poorer. He does not have great regard for his country.
He believes that there is "Nothing much to see. It's a village like hundreds of other there, small shops where people make things, cook food, police station, school. The house; A mosque, small. It's very dry -dust, dusty, Sand" (Gordimer 25).Abdu is ashamed of his Meanwhile, South African immigration authorities send Abdu a letter asking him to leave South Africa as early as possible because they consider his stay in South Africa as illegal.
With the help of her father's friend Julie tries to get Abdu a visa to resume his stay but her efforts are ended in vain. He is getting ready to go back to his home country. Julie persuades him to take her along with him. Before they go to the unnamed Arab country, they get married because in the Islamic countries a woman accompanying a man without the bondage of marriage she will be called a "whore" and not a "wife". Abdu is happy to marry Julie, but he feels guilty about arriving home with a foreign woman as a wife because he has not earned enough money to give a better life to his mother.

Abdu in
Gordimer writes: "He was coming back and it was not as the successful son who had made a better life, the Western life of television version, bringing them a share of it in his pockets and in his person, but as a reject, with nothing but a wife-a foreign woman." (114)Abdu is not happy to stay in his corrupted country. He is very anxious to leave his country to try to get a better job in Australia, Canada and the United States. His aim is to earn more money and send it to "his mother whom he wanted to bring away to a better life" (Gordimer 123).He asks Julie to come with him to America. But she rejects his idea and decided to stay in Arab.
Abdu's wife Julie and Amir's spouse Soraya are also comparable in the sense that they possess similar characteristics. Both remain constant in the face of persistent judgment.