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Character Development In The Novel Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

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Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred tells the tale of American slavery from a more modern-day perspective through time travel. The novel includes many themes and recurring motifs, but it also includes many different characters with different motivations and personalities that all go through some sort of character development. No one character follows a certain archetype commonly found in a lot of other literary works, and it makes the story engaging and more realistic. First off is Dana, the main character of the story. At the novel's start, Dana has experience with doing hard labor to barely make a living, but her development starts after she travels back to the Weylin plantation. More specifically on her second trip “The Fire” when Dana heads …show more content…

Rufus starts as a boy who wishes revenge against his father who beats him, however, he is not as racist as Weylin, even being friends with many other slave children, which continues as he grows older. The first time we get to see the true Rufus is after he rapes Alice for the first time, leading her husband Isaac to attempt to kill Rufus. This shows that no matter how much he cares about Alice, he still sees her as a slave that must do what he wants. This continues after Alice is captured and bought by Rufus, and Rufus continues to force her into sexual acts against her will. Rufus also begins to use both Alice and Dana as an outlet for his anger, beating Alice when Dana leaves and sending Dana to work in the fields after his father dies. Despite this, Rufus does still have some redeemable traits in his later life, agreeing to free some of the slave children after Dana’s urging. However, Rufus still continues to see black people as inferior, trying to scare Alice into loving him by pretending to sell their children, and later trying to force himself onto Dana for the first time in the whole story, showing that while Rufus is not as cruel as his father, he cannot be molded by Dana into a person that sees all people as

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Brief Summary Of Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

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The novel Kindred, written by the author Octavia E. Butler, was about a black woman named Dana Franklin traveling through time to save her ancestors to ensure her birth. Dana travels back to the 1800s, to the era known as the “Antebellum South.” The novel opens with a horrific scene of Dana having her arm crushed in the wall of her house and being taken to the hospital. The police question her about what happened, as they accuse her husband Kevin. Eventually Kevin is cleared as a suspect and is allowed to see his wife Dana.

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Kindred By Octavia E. Butler: An Analysis

451 Words | 2 Pages

Kindred is a story about the past intertwining with the present. Dana, a black woman from the 1970’s, is taken back in time to the antebellum South. She gets sent to Rufus, the son of a plantation owner, to protect him time and time again. Each time she travels back to the South, she remains there for a longer period of time with a higher risk of death accompanying her stay. She ended her long spell of being trapped in the South by murdering Rufus, thus making it impossible for her to return to the past.

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Examples Of Character Development In Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson

755 Words | 4 Pages

When she says “My head is killing me, my throat is killing me, my stomach bubbles with toxic waste. I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice, or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my mind too?”

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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

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Genetics Vs Environment Quotes In Kindred

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It’s significant that he is influenced by his abusive family and the world where slave owners treat people like personal property. Dana, the protagonist of the novel, travels back in time to save him when he is in life threatening danger since he is a little boy. It becomes clear for her that he is her ancestor and she really is trying to influence him to become a different man, unlike his father. Rufus doesn’t live up to her expectations and becomes even worse than him.

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How Does Octavia Butler Use Power In Kindred

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Caroline Enriquez-Ruiz Rice English 9 15 May 2023 “Rape Rewarded”: The Unquenchable Thirst for Control in Octavia Butler’s Kindred In the novel Kindred, Octavia Butler explores the complex relationship between power, gender, and race. Through the character of Dana and her interactions with Rufus, Alice, and Margaret Weylin, Butler highlights the ways in which power is often tied to gender and race, and how those who lack power are often oppressed and marginalized.

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Kindred And Dana Relationship

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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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Character Analysis Of Rufus Weylin In Octavia Butler's Kindred '

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

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Kindred By Octavia Butler: Literary Analysis

642 Words | 3 Pages

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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The Fight For Freedom In Octavia Butler's Kindred

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.

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Embodied Agency In Octavia Butler's Kindred

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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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Octavia Butler's Kindred As A Feminist

1563 Words | 7 Pages

She explores themes such as identity, oppression, community, and power through the views of a black feminist, and she treats these themes with the expression they deserve. She is a solitary voice in a genre dominated by white males and she brings emotionality, passion, and optimism to Science Fiction. One of her more popular novels, and fourth to be published, is Kindred. This book uses time travel as transportation for exploring the terror and torture of the occurring South. The main character, Dana, is a modern black woman who has both slave and white ancestry.

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Education In Octavia Butler's Kindred

1843 Words | 8 Pages

Maryland in 1815, like much of the south, was a hot bed for slavery plantations. For slave owners in particular, it was a benefit if your slaves were not educated, as they would be less likely to question the oppressive treatment, and not adequately be able to express the conditions under which they labored. In the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler, various aspects of education are intertwined throughout, effectively depicting how education and slavery do not go together cohesively. Specifically, in the case of Dana, the novels protagonist, her intelligence led to her owners feeling inferior, which prompted many verbal and physical attacks, an exploitation of her abilities, and the overriding attempt to suppress the education of other slaves

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Kindred Quotes

753 Words | 4 Pages

Not only does he start selling slaves just because “he can,” he also slaps Dana when she doesn't obey him, proving that they’re not equals as Dana thought. When Dana comes back to his time for the final time, the readers find out that Alice had taken her own life after Rufus sold her kids in order to “teach her a lesson” (251). It shows that Rufus is willing to go to extreme lengths in order to keep what he has, which in this case, was Alice. Even when he seemed depressed, he still isn’t willing to free the slaves, proving that even Alice’s death hasn’t changed him. Towards the end of the book, he attempts to rape Dana which results in her stabbing, and eventually killing

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Comparing The Relationship In Octavia E. Butler's Kindred

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.

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