political issues that are raised within the novel. Hosseini is intrepid enough as an author to create complex characters such as Assef who represent a supreme and complex Islamic figure within the community who demand authority from those he seems as being beneath him in status and ethnicity. Erickson states that:

Postcolonial is a useful term to apply to writing only insofar as it refers to writers emerging from varied cultures and circumstances, who have experienced analogous structures of dominance imposed in the past by colonizing powers and shaped in the present by those same or external powers, or by indigenous (neo−colonist) powers. The writers I call postcolonial seek, each in her or his own way, a space of writing that sets itself apart from those structures of power. (Erickson, 1998, p. ix−x)