This article examines how the conceptual opposition of good and evil is linguistically constructed through metaphor and imagery in three novels by Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner (2003), A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013). The study combines Conceptual Metaphor Theory with a discourse-oriented account of literary metaphor, and applies the Metaphor Identification Procedure to a purposively sampled corpus of evaluative passages in which moral judgement is expressed figuratively rather than named directly. The analysis identifies five recurrent source domains that carry the moral load of the three narratives: light and darkness, vertical space, natural cycles of water and drought, predation and disease, and culturally salient artefacts such as the kite, the wall and the blade. Results show that Hosseini rarely lexicalises moral categories with abstract nouns; instead, goodness and evil are encoded in perceptual imagery, and their evaluative polarity is frequently reversed or suspended within the same image, so that a single source domain serves both poles. The article argues that this internal reversibility, rather than a stable binary scheme, constitutes the distinctive feature of Hosseini’s moral idiom, and that it produces specific problems of equivalence for translators working into typologically and culturally distant languages, including Uzbek. The findings contribute to cognitive stylistics, to the study of Afghan diaspora fiction, and to the description of figurative moral language in literary translation.

conceptual metaphor, imagery, good and evil, moral evaluation, cognitive stylistics, Khaled Hosseini, Afghan diaspora fiction, literary translation.

K. Hosseini, The Kite Runner. New York, NY, USA: Riverhead Books, 2003.

K. Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York, NY, USA: Riverhead Books, 2007.

K. Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed. New York, NY, USA: Riverhead Books, 2013.

G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL, USA: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980.

Z. Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, 2nd ed. New York, NY, USA: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. [Online]. Available: https://academic.oup.com/book/48390

E. Semino, Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008. [Online]. Available: https://research.lancaster-university.uk/en/publications/metaphor-in-discourse/

Pragglejaz Group, “MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse,” Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 1–39, 2007, doi: 10.1080/10926480709336752.

A. Ramezani, J. Stellar, M. Feinberg, and Y. Xu, “Evolution of the moral lexicon,” Open Mind, 2024, doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00164.

D. Zhai, Y. Guo, and Z. Lu, “A dual mechanism of cognition and emotion in processing moral-vertical metaphors,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, art. 1554, 2018, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01554.

W. Zhang, W. Liu, X. He, X. Zhu, Y.-C. Duan, Y. Huang, and Z. Yu, “Keeping morality ‘on the straight’ and never ‘on the bend’: Metaphorical representations of moral concepts in straightness and curvature,” Behavioral Sciences, vol. 13, no. 4, art. 295, 2023, doi: 10.3390/bs13040295.

J. Zhang, Y. Liu, K. Li, L. Li, H. Wang, Y. Lin, and B. DiFabrizio, “Morphological metaphor mapping of moral concepts in Chinese culture,” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, art. 554061, 2020, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.554061.

L. Arcimavičienė, “Morality through metaphor: A cross-linguistic analysis of political discourse,” Kalbotyra, 2008, doi: 10.15388/Klbt.2008.7588.

J. Du, “A journey of self-actualization of Amir in The Kite Runner,” English Language and Literature Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, p. 90, 2017, doi: 10.5539/ells.v7n3p90.

A. Hosseini and E. Zohdi, “The Kite Runner and the problem of racism and ethnicity,” International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, vol. 74, pp. 33–40, 2016, doi: 10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.74.33.

M. Sarhan, “Classism, stereotypes, persecution, and man’s inhumanity to man in Hosseini’s The Kite Runner,” Journal of Arts, vol. 1, no. 8, 2021, doi: 10.53286/arts.v1i8.305.

E. A. Ali and Q. K. Hussein, “Women’s shared traumas in Khaled Hosseini’s selected novels: A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed, and The Kite Runner,” Middle East Journal of Language, Linguistics and Literature Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 2023, doi: 10.56961/mejlls.v1i2.427.

W. Lu, “Independency, awakening of female self-consciousness and self-redemption — Interpretation of A Thousand Splendid Suns,” Advances in Literary Study, vol. 7, no. 1, 2019, doi: 10.4236/als.2019.71002.

M. Asif, O. Al-Smadi, R. A. Rashid, H. H. Ismail, and B. Yassin, “Sisterhood as a saviour of Afghan women: An analysis of Khaled Hosseini’s ideology,” English Language and Literature Studies, vol. 10, no. 4, p. 78, 2020, doi: 10.5539/ells.v10n4p78.

M. Imran and S. Ismail, “Khaled Hosseini’s women as modern archetypes: A study of obedient, resistant and empowered Afghan women,” Frontiers in Sociology, vol. 7, art. 1041435, 2022, doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2022.1041435.

M. Jamal, M. Nababan, R. Santosa, and D. Djatmika, “Translation analysis of Afghan female character through politeness strategy: A sociopragmatic study of Mariam in A Thousand Splendid Suns,” Cogent Arts & Humanities, vol. 11, no. 1, 2024, doi: 10.1080/23311983.2024.2411847.

G. Raees, M. Rauf, S. Ikram, and S. Akhtar, “A legitimate end to illegitimate beginning: A critical analysis of Mariam’s character in A Thousand Splendid Suns,” English Language and Literature Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 113, 2017, doi: 10.5539/ells.v7n1p113.

S. Ghimire, “Women as subalterns: An analysis of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner,” Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 23, no. 2, 2023, doi: 10.24071/joll.v23i2.5361.

Shahram, A. (2026, June). THE FUNCTION OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN CONSTRUCTING COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN KHALED HOSSEINI’S NOVELS. In THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC-PRACTICAL CONFERENCE ON THE TOPIC “PROCESSING OF LINGUODIDACTICS, LINGUOPHILOSOPHY AND TRANSLATION STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS” (Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1004-1008).

Umida, K., Gulzahiryam, A., Zarina, R., & Shahram, A. (2020). The role of information technologies in improving educational efficiency. ACADEMICIA: An International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 10(3), 191-193.