卡勒德•胡塞尼是第一位以英文写作的阿富汗作家，他的首部小说《追风筝的人》于2003年出版之后风靡全球。这部小说以1970年到当代的阿富汗为背景 ，讲述了塔利班政权下，两个喀布尔少年阿米尔和哈桑之间关于背叛和救赎的故事。这本书多次登上《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜和各大读书榜，现已发行至全球48个国家。 这部小说在全球受到广泛的关注。总体说来，多数评论集中在小说的主题，写作手法和社会学意义方面。但是目前在中国很少有人对这部小说做系统研究，尤其是从文学体裁，即成长小说这一角度分析《追风筝的人》。本文试图先通过追溯成长小说的传统，给出成长小说的定义，分析归纳这种文学体裁的普遍特征。然后探索小说是如何利用成长小说这一文学体裁来展示主人公阿米尔的成长过程，并且依据成长小说的主要特征，即内容、人物和结构三个角度分析这部小说。因此，我们可以得出结论，《追风筝的人》在主要特征上体现了成长小说的要素，可以界定其是一部成长小说。

Published in 2003, The Kite Runner was said to be the first novel written in English by an Afghan writer, Khaled Hosseini. The story is set in Afghanistan from the late 1970s to contemporary era during the Taliban regime. It tells a story about Amir, a boy from Kabul who is haunted by the guilt of betraying his childhood friend Hassan. Appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and many book club reading lists, the book was an international bestseller published in 48 countries. The Kite Runner receives great critical acclaim all over the world. Generally speaking, most reviews are focused on the themes, the writing features and the sociological meaning. Yet few people in China have done systematical research on this novel, especially from the perspective of the literary genre, Initiation Story. This undergraduate dissertation intends to trace back to the tradition of initiation story, give the definition of the initiation story and analyzes the general feature of this genre, and explore how the novel manages to use the initiation story to show the growing process of the protagonist, Amir. It will focus on the analysis of the novel according to the general features of Initiation Story, in terms of the content, the characters and the structure. Consequently we can get the conclusion that the novel embodies the elements of Initiation Story in its major characteristics, the symbol Kite and the structure, and it can be defined as an Initiation Story.