ipl-logo

Analysis Of Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

913 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Literary analysis octavia butler

Kindred is a book written June 1979 by Octavia E. Butler comprised of two genres, historical fiction, and science fiction and as a result, the book classifies into a new genre. This book can be considered a historical fiction because it shows the history of the pre Civil War 1800s when there were still slaves and it shows the perspective of a slave's life in the south. This book can also be considered a science fiction because Dana can time travel. The logistical issues for it cause the effects to be considered science fiction. Kindred can also be called both of these two genres, but the genre it creates is something new. The book Kindred can be classified as a new type of genre called a neo-slave narrative because it is made with the culmination …show more content…

During the time that she was on the Weylin plantation, she had either got whipped or physically assaulted by every family member of the Weylin family. Octavia Butler had explained the first time Tom Weylin had whipped Dana because she was secretly teaching Nigel to read, “Then I was out of the cookhouse. Weylin dragged me a few feet, then pushed me hard. I fell, knocked myself breathless. I never saw where the whip came from, never even saw the first blow coming. But it came— like a hot iron across my back, burning into me through my light shirt, searing my skin …”(Butler 107). Dana also had formed different relationships with different slaves because they either had house jobs instead of field jobs and some slaves did not for her personality and some didn’t. For most slaves in the 1800’s, slaves and their masters had very little to no relationship and the masters would only tell them what to do or face their consequences. For all of these reasons, the book could categorize into the genre of historical …show more content…

The book has been qualified as a science fiction novel because it incorporates time travel, scientifically impossible for humans right now, but Dana somehow was able to do the impossible. The book is historical fiction because it describes the conditions of a slave during the 1800s by describing all of the emotional and physical aspects of it. The book is a neo-slave narrative because it has both elements of each genre because it has incorporated time travel and describing what it is like to be a slave, but not just one of

Show More
Related
732 Words | 3 Pages

Throughout the narrative, the author includes his personal stories about experiencing the violence of slavery first-hand. For example, on page 20, he writes about the first time he witnessed a slave, his own aunt, getting the whip. “The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest…I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition… It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery…” The author including his experience of his aunts whipping, in detail, appeals to the emotions of the reader.

Read More
1936 Words | 8 Pages

Analyzing Character Development: Dana Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, provides a unique look into slavery in the antebellum South through the eyes of Edana Franklin, a black woman living in the late 20th century, who is suddenly sent through time to the early 19th century where she is suddenly faced with the task of protecting her ancestor, Rufus, from many dangers in order to ensure her existence in the present. Dana begins her adventure with no knowledge of how or why she has been given this responsibility and, as a result, must adapt to her new and unfamiliar surroundings. As the novel progresses, the reader sees Dana’s internal battle with herself as she decides whether or not Rufus is worth saving, or if she should let Rufus die

Read More
1200 Words | 5 Pages

Introduction As the world’s population continues to migrate and live in urban areas, planners, engineers, and politicians have an important role to ensure that they are livable and sustainable. But what defines an urban area and what makes it so attractive? In my opinion, urban areas are places that consist of a variety of land uses and buildings, where services and amenities are easily accessible to the general public, and includes an established multimodal transportation network. Also, it should be a place where people can play, learn, work, and grow in a safe and collaborative manner.

Read More
960 Words | 4 Pages

In Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, Rufus Weylin is one of the main characters who undergoes a lot of change throughout the novel, making him a round character. A round character is defined as a “major character in a story who encounters contradictory situations and undergoes transformation during this phase. Therefore, the characters does not remain the same throughout the narrative, making their traits difficult to identify from beginning until the end (LiteraryDevice).” The reader, along with Dana, follows Rufus’s growth throughout some major points in his life, from a young boy who forms a bond and friendship with Dana, to when he grows up to be a racist man who ultimately attempts to rape her. However, it is evident that Rufus’s ideology

Read More
951 Words | 4 Pages

The characters are very important in Octavia Butler’s science fiction short story “Bloodchild”. A character is a person presented on a dramatic or narrative work. When it comes to the story of “Bloodchild”, most people would agree that gender roles are reversed. This agreement may end, however, on the question of character in Butler. It is safe to say that understanding the characters, who they are and what they do, help explain the theme of gender roles.

Read More
1169 Words | 5 Pages

Even though Linda Brent (Harriet Jacobs) was expected to fulfill the expectations of white womanhood, she was not able to because of the setbacks she encountered, which include preserving her purity for her future husband, accepting pieties, staying submissive to the man in charge, and maintaining a safe domesticity. According to Barbara Weller, “Piety was the core of woman’s virtue, the source of her strength” (Weller. 152). Linda Brent had a hard time keeping this outlook because she justified that God would not let Mr. Flint sell her children or cause them harm unless He were not real or wished for a negative outcome. As stated by Brent, “O my Child!

Read More
642 Words | 3 Pages

A normality in the literary world is that texts deeply nestled in the crosshairs of biopolitics, gender, nationalism, and other identity particularities often fall victim to one sided and dogmatic cultural critiques. Critic after critic find difficulty regarding how to analyze and essentially read a novel where intersectionality is intrinsic to its framework such as Kindred, because it does not fit the fairly common singular literary theory mold. This notion is articulated and defended in “"Some Matching Strangeness": Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler's "Kindred"” where Robertson explores Butler’s usage of Dana’s body to confront universal truths and to cement the idea that Dana is in a historical paradox due

Read More
1598 Words | 7 Pages

Situations are defined by choices. Small actions in one moment of time alter the future of what happens forever. In Kindred by Octavia Butler Dana, the main character, is a black women born in 1976, who time travels back to the early 1800’s in order to save her relative, Rufus, a white boy who is the son of the owner of the plantation. Along the way she also meets her other relative, Alice, a slave born free, but enslaved since she helped her husband run away. Alice is owned by Rufus, who is convinced that he is in love with her.

Read More
886 Words | 4 Pages

In his “’No.’ : The Narrative Theorizing of Embodied Agency in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” Bast underscores humanity’s desire for agency, one’s “ability to reach decision[s] about themselves and [express them]” and how one’s agency can benefit a society or a community (Bast 151). In the beginning of his article, Bast labels this decision-making and expression as beneficial and necessary for a community, while simultaneously underlining society’s limitations put on mankind’s freedoms such as discrimination, prejudice, or injustice. Nevertheless, he follows up by stating that it is simply human instinct to want to express thoughts even if other factors oppress them, undermining these social limitations.

Read More
667 Words | 3 Pages

Imagine waking up in complete darkness and not knowing who or where you are. That was the problem that Shori, the main character in “Fledgling”, faced at the beginning of the novel. After figuring out she had become an Ina (similar to a vampire) and finding her father, Shori and her symbionts (co-dependent humans) move into a community with other Ina’s. Soon after she moves in, several Ina’s plan to kill Ina because she is genetically modified. Shori has human melanin, making her skin dark and allowing her to move around freely in the daylight.

Read More
1083 Words | 5 Pages

In any novel there is multiple parts that make up and define how the novel will go, such as if the character will be good. There is always a storyline to follow and from that storyline there are many different themes that give the novel character. In the novel Kindred by Octavian Butler there are multiple themes laced into the text that make the novel what it is. For example, throughout the story there is a huge underlying theme that involves Rufus Weylin, a main character of the novel and how the environment shapes him into the man he is at the end of the novel. Kindred starts off with Dana, a black woman, who by some mysterious means is sent back in time, to the days where her ancestors were alive and enslaved by Tom Weylin, a southern plantation

Read More
967 Words | 4 Pages

In the novel, Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler, a lot of ignorance and intelligence is demonstrated all through the book which in a way is dangerous. Kindred is a wonderful work of science fiction that catches the attention of readers by telling a story of Dana, a modern-day African-American woman, who is abruptly transported from California in 1976 to the antebellum South. Not only is Dana abruptly transported back in time but she’s able to experience first-hand the cruelty of enslaved black women and men in the 1800s. The experiences of Dana and the enslaved women in the novel were viewed as mostly women working in households.

Read More
896 Words | 4 Pages

In Judith Butler’s essay,” Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” she attempts to clarify what is considered human and what defines a human, and how it applies to the different gender roles and human rights. The difficulty that this essay presents, however, is its ambiguity – the fact that she fails to clearly identify what a human is and sort of challenges the readers to look within themselves to search for their own interpretation of what they believe gives them their own moral rights and human integrity. Human integrity is a word that can easily be defined when searched for in any dictionary database. “LawCookies.com” defines it as, “the human right to live without being physically harmed or harassed by others. No one can touch,

Read More
853 Words | 4 Pages

Dana and Rufus’s Relationship Ever wonder what it's like to have a changing relationship with a plantation owner's son back in the 1800’s? Dana Franklin is a younger African-American woman married to Kevin Franklin who is a middle-aged man. Dana travels from California in 1976 back to the early 1800’s whenever Rufus is in trouble. Rufus is a plantation owner son and is also the father of Dana’s ancestor. Dana’s travels are random; she gets lightheaded and dizzy when she is about to travel.

Read More
1970 Words | 8 Pages

Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420). For telling Mrs. Garner what they had done, she was badly beaten by them, leaving a “chokecherry tree” (16) on her back. But that was not the overriding issue.

Read More

More about Analysis Of Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

Related Topics

Open Document