Foils: Soraya and Amir

"Then I did something I hadn't done in fifteen years of marriage: I told my wife everything." pg. 325 I have always thought of foil characters as one good and one bad, or the hero and the goofy sidekick, but I think in this case Soraya and Amir are foils to each other in at least one area. They are foil characters because to a similar situation, they each responded in a way totally different. Earlier in the novel when Amir asked for her hand in marriage from her father, Soraya had the honor, guts, and courage to do the right thing and tell Amir her story. Even though she had run away, been with a guy, and was shunned by most of the Afghan community, she knew that the honorable thing to do was to tell Amir of what she did before they got married. She knew that he could shun her like the other men, but she still told him. However, Amir did not tell Soraya his story until fifteen years later after he was bashed by Assef and told Hassan's story. Instead of telling Soraya what he did and his past failures when she told him, he opted out and let Soraya take the whole weight upon her shoulders. He did not have the courage to tell her and did not have the courage to let her judge him as a suitable husband as he had judged her. He did redeem himself when he told her the whole story, so it took courage to tell her after fifteen years and to also take on the extra burden of her realizing he had kept things.