Rachel Heinen Dr. Bolis ENGL 1301W 3 March 2023 Analytical Response #4 - Kindred In the novel Kindred, by Octavia Butler, there are many instances of direct and indirect characterization. Direct characterization involves the technique of directly telling the readers something about a character while indirect characterization involves showing the reader through actions and dialogue. An excellent example of direct characterization is how Butler directly tells the readers right away in the novel that Dana is African American.
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.
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
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.
Did you know that 20% of the American population during the Antebellum Period were African Americans? In Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, the author deeply describes how the discrimination of Africans living in America leads up to conflict in the novel. Relating to reality, slavery has been one of the biggest conflict in the past for many years and still occurs today. Kindred will show the people today how we look back in time to see what we have done. The historical time period in the 1800s developed the theme and the character of the time period, but mostly the conflict is deeply expressed.
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.
Kindred In the novel Kindred, the author uses the source of time travel to travel back to the nineteenth century in the United States, to experience the lifestyle of enslaved African Americans by the Whites. Traveling back in time, the author uses Dana to revert to slavery, experiencing abuse and having to adapt quickly to the environment. Readers can experience both mental and psychical experiences the antebellum slaves experienced during this time, though treatment varied from master to master, the diurnal living of a slave was still difficult. Throughout the novel, differences of the modern and past time are illustrated to see how the society has changed with time and how it responds to the decision and the way of life of others.
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
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.
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.
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
The title Kindred tell the story of Dana because Kindred means family. The point of Dana traveling back in time was to save one of her ancestors Rufus. Despite the fact of her traveling to save Rufus all the time, her life was always in danger. Whenever Dana thinks she’s in danger, she travels back to her present life. The title is also related to other characters such a Kevin her husband.
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.
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.
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
