And the Mountains Echoed

The strongest motif in the novel centers around stories. Storytelling is used to make sense of a character’s life—either for instruction on or to view life as an unfinished narrative. The novel begins with an important fable and its lesson can be applied to several characters throughout the story. Hosseini may be suggesting that a human life can be viewed as a story, and the web that weaves and winds between human relationships means that our stories are also interconnected. This is why his story is told with so many different narrators; They each provide the context of how they fit into this one large story, and even though they may not be connected by blood, they are brought into each other’s lives, the grand narrative, even if it is for a brief moment. All having a part of this one grand narrative also reveals that there are many similarities between people, times, and places.

This tree serves not only as a physical marker in geography in the story (a center point in Shadbagh) but also a marker of time. It was present when Abdullah was young, and it was his father who cut it down after he sold Pari.