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Octavia Butler's Kindred: Literary Analysis

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Imagine being a modern African American woman, and all of the sudden you start feeling dizzy, and wake up in 1815. Not only you don’t know how you got there, but also you don’t know how you are going to get back home. Later, you realize that you are there to save the life of a slave owner’s child. The child you are trying to protect, end us up being a relative of yours. In the novel “Kindred” by Octavia Butler, includes the main character Dana, a modern colored woman that overcomes many obstacles as she experiences slavery. As a result, it leads her to fight for her own life in order to survive in the 1800’s. Through Dana’s experience, it helps readers understand, and realize that slavery was not an easy time in our country’s history and demonstrates …show more content…

The fact that this story mainly takes place in a plantation in Maryland, back in the 1800’s, shows how people didn’t see all races the same. During the 1800’s was back when white people acted more superior than the colored people, who were treated differently just because of their skin color. They were labeled, treated unequally, and abused, all because of their skin color. In the novel Kindred, Tom Weylin along with his son Rufus Weylin, both were very strict with their slaves. They would mistreat them and whip them, without feeling bad at all. This demonstrates how their power had no limits on how far they could go on treating someone badly, especially their slaves. They both take advantage of their power to get what they want, and to make someone’s life …show more content…

She also believes that Octavia Butler focused more on using science fiction (time travel) in the beginning of the book to make it the main problem first, before introducing the actual historical problems, such as slavery. Yaszek mentions, “When Rufus’s gun-wielding father appears, she returns to her own world in an equally sudden manner”. This means that Dana couldn’t believe what was going on, it felt very unreal to her.
The main character Dana forgets throughout the story that her actions may have an effect on others around her, such as her husband Kevin. Yaszek believes that Dana failed at understanding that there was always consequences for every decision she made because she was the one who basically controlled her time traveling. The book ends by Rufus attempting to rape Dana, but she manages to kill him first and returns back home to California, which also ends with her time-traveling experiences.

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