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Analyzing Character Development In Octavia Butler's Kindred '

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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 …show more content…

It grabs the reader’s attention immediately with its opening sentence, “I lost an arm on my last trip home.” This foreshadows the violence and physical suffering that Dana will face in the novel. The police officers, who arrested Kevin because they believed he was responsible for Dana’s injuries, foreshadows the abuse of power that the authority figures, in this case Rufus and his father, will display. The reader also gets a look at Dana’s hesitation to tell the complete truth out of fear of being disbelieved or considered …show more content…

Tom Weylin has grown much older and frail, and tells Dana that as long as she cares for Rufus he will allow her to stay, and he will hurt her if any harm comes to him. Dana believes him. Tom soon dies of a heart attack, and Rufus believes that Dana could have saved him. Rufus sends Dana to work in the fields as a punishment for not saving him, and she is whipped. Rufus is just as controlling as ever and forces Dana to stay, and when she does he becomes gentler. He wants Dana to care for his mother and allows Dana to spend the rest of the day doing whatever she chooses. When Margaret returns, she forces Dana to care for her, but she has lost the temper due to age and the drugs she is taking. One day, Dana discovers that some of the plantation’s slaves are being sold and is devastated. Rufus claims that his father arranged the sale before he died. Alice gives birth to Hagar, and Dana is relieved because this means that her existence in the present is safe. She is not immediately sent home and must deal with more trouble with Rufus, including being slapped by him, so she later decides to attempt suicide, knowing that the danger will send her home, and if it doesn’t she is at the very least free from the danger. This event is also the first time that Dana forces herself to be sent to the present rather than waiting for danger to find her. She is finally fleeing Rufus’s abuses, feeling betrayed because this is the first time that Rufus

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In Kindred, a novel by Octavia Butler, we see Dana, a young African-American woman living in Los Angeles in 1976 travel back in time to the 1800’s for a seemingly unknown reason. Here, we see that she is put in charge of Rufus Weylin, the father of a relative of Dana. Throughout the novel, we see their relationship transform in different ways. Their relationship started off with Dana being a guardian to Rufus, as the story continues we see that they develop into a friendship and then ultimately take on the role of slave owner and enslaved. Although it is not explicitly stated in the story, we see that Dana had big plans in terms of how Rufus could be changed into a plantation owner with morals.

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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

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In Kindred, Dana’s narrative entirely revolves around the slaveholding American narrative of Rufus which illustrates the second fiddle notion of Dana’s identities. The fact that she can only time travel when white man, Rufus, mortally needs her demonstrates that her entire story regardless of time is dictated by the White Man (Butler 12). Furthermore regarding time fragmentation, the imagery of Dana’s body being in a constant state of scars, bruises, and general crisis in 1976 and 1819 while Rufus’ body and life continues in a progressive linear state depicts how the white historical narrative continues to strut along time whereas the black, female, American narrative continues to be an unhealed wound discarded alongside white-American-male chronology. This notion is expressed when Dana puts her bodily pain to the side in order to sexually usher love and welcoming to Kevin’s five year journey in Antebellum south (Butler 190). Essentially Dana’s body politics do not exist in a state of paradox because through Butler’s textual portrayal of embodiment, she was and still remains as an

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This analysis of agency would be useful for a person pushing for more freedom of expression or freedom of speech. All in all, Bast’s successfully supports his perspective of agency through his evaluation of Kindred, and the comparison of the human instinct of expression to Dana’s want to create change with her time traveling powers constructs a powerful parallel between the novel and Bast’s article. The novel Kindred, however, serves to create an important message about society on its own, as well. Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a science-fiction novel that depicts the life experiences of a young black woman named Dana, who is given the task of traveling back in time to the era of slavery to save her ancestors, but is unjustly oppressed and has most, if not all, of her rights stripped away from her simply due to her race and gender. As a result, the most prominent overarching theme of the novel is the inequality of power and social status given to people of varying gender and race, and the struggle that those people must go through to gain as much freedom and equality as possible.

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