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Kindred Suicide Quotes

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In Kindred by Octavia Butler, Alice is a strong minded and sharp tongued individual, who doesn’t let being a slave stop her from striving for what she wants. She fights for her freedom throughout the book, not caring that her position as a slave requires that she be compliant and invisible. Alice is an intense character who only acts submissive when it is necessary for her survival, but she mostly sticks to her beliefs and is stubborn. She runs away numerous times, the first time, losing her husband, Isaac. She is never the same after this and gains the desire to run away more after he is gone. Her final act of rebellion is her suicide when she believes her children are sold and wants to take revenge on Rufus, her owner. Her suicide, counter …show more content…

Leading up to her suicide she continues her unruly antics against the Weylins including: talking back, running away, refusing to eat, and looking through Rufus’s belongings. She attempts to run away numerous times and is always caught. The first time she runs away Isaac is sold, her soul is broken, and it takes her a long time to recover. After he’s sold she is less content with her life on the plantation and lashes out at Dana and others. Dana spends lots of time with Alice and grows to understand Alice’s emotions towards Rufus, “She forgave him nothing, forgot nothing, hated him as deeply as she had loved Isaac (180).” This explains why Alice acts the way she does and is so determined to get away from Rufus because all that he and his family has done to her. Rufus desires her and her love. He has authority over her so he is able to threaten and manipulate her to be his lover.. When Dana summons Alice for Rufus, Alice acts like she is unafraid of the consequences that come with refusing him,“‘I ought to take a knife in there with me and cut his damn throat.’ She glared at me. ‘Now go tell him that! Tell him I’m talking ’bout killing him!(167)’” When she says this, she seems to not care about being a slave and wants her voice to be heard by Rufus and for him to know she isn’t a toy for him. At times she may mask these opinions to survive, but they are always there towards Rufus. Throughout the book Alice speaks her mind and goes against slave norms to find her path away from Rufus and the

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200 Words | 1 Pages

After this Alice tries to run away from the plantation

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940 Words | 4 Pages

Two of Alice’s children, Hagar and Joseph, were sent to Baltimore by Rufus. Alice believed that Rufus had sold them, even though he swore he would not, ultimately this caused her to hang herself out of sadness. Dana was furious with Rufus. He didn’t understand what he had done wrong, even though Dana had told him time and time again. Ultimately Rufus gets Dana alone and tells her he feels horrible and that he never meant any harm.

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664 Words | 3 Pages

She is knocked to the ground and is held at gunpoint. This is one of the shortest times she spends back in the 1800s but it is easily one of the most important for the reader. It gives the reader their first glimpse of what life in going to be like for Dana very soon. She travels back in forth a few times and learns that the boy she saved is actually her ancestor and he starts to become as fond of

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1582 Words | 7 Pages

Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a powerful combination of slave narratives and fictional writing. Through the twenty-six-year old Dana Franklin, Butler explores two time periods and two settings. Dana travels back and forth between Los Angeles 1976 and the Maryland plantation of a slave owner in the 19th century in order to save Rufus Weylin, one of her ancestors. To insure her family lineage, and therefore her own existence, the black Dana experiences the life of a slave, witnessing and enduring terror and extreme violence. Butler in her novel touches on different themes including slavery, women’s status, history, and racial dynamics in both times.

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1936 Words | 8 Pages

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.

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840 Words | 4 Pages

ower? I define power as the ability to do something, have the ability to influence others to do something. In a brief summary To Kill a Mockingbird author Lee Harper uses memorable characters to explore civil rights and racism in the segregated southern united states of the 1930’s. The story is told from through the eyes of Scout Finch, you learn about her father Atticus FInch who is an attorney who hopelessly strives to prove the innocence of a black man unjustly accused of rape; and about Boo Radley a mysterious neighbor who saves Scout and her brother Jem from being killed, because of her class and gender Mayella is powerless but, her race makes her powerful.

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1598 Words | 7 Pages

In death she no longer has to face any consequences. Later, after Alice died, in his grief Rufus tries to make a move on Dana. Dana decides to grab her knife in a desperate move to escape being raped. “A slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her.

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776 Words | 4 Pages

Grandmother Hagar Weylin, an ancestor of Dana’s was born in the year 1831. Her parents were Rufus Weylin, a white man and Alice Greenwood, a freed, black woman. Hagar, born biracial (half black half white) married Oliver Blake and had seven children. Dana remembers a chest of historical information at her uncle’s house, and in that chest was a bible and a family tree Hagar had kept records of family members up to her death. Grandmother Hagar was organized because despite the difficult circumstances she was living under (society - being a black woman in the Antebellum South), she was still able to keep track of her family generations as times got difficult.

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1590 Words | 7 Pages

This enjoyable novel is filled with nonsense and no real lesson to be learned. It is void of all obedience advice and the punishment for being naughty is non-existence. The situations are irrelevant and the characters make no sense, but that is the point. The book is trying to lock Alice’s childhood forever by adding nonsense. Carroll states in his introduction, “In gentler tones Secunda hopes there must be nonsense in it!”

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1099 Words | 5 Pages

This is reiterated as the dormouse tells his story about “three little sisters” and Alice constantly interrupts

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319 Words | 2 Pages

This quote is said anonymously by the protagonist in the novel, The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides. In this novel, Eugenides writes the story of neighborhood boys who are in love with the 5 Lisbon daughters. They are fascinated with everything they do and say and constantly document and story tell what they found out or heard. One day, after one of the sisters committed suicide they began to realize sudden changes between the four other sisters. Years later after the death of all 5 sisters, they uncover one of their diaries.

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166 Words | 1 Pages

She even said, “It’s a great sin what you and Papa did to me. You’re to blame that nothing ’s become of me” (Ibsen 1371). She exactly knew that her whole life was a play and she was controlled by the men of her life. In order to make something meaningful with the rest of her existence she had to

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853 Words | 4 Pages

She transforms from Rufus’s guardian to his companion and finally she becomes his property or slave. Rufus and Dana have a intricate relationship that changes over the years as she is in the past. Dana needs to keep Rufus alive long enough, so that Rufus and Alice could have Dana’s ancestor. Rufus and Dana’s changing relationship is important because without this relationship Rufus wouldn’t have stayed alive long enough to have Dana’s ancestor. Dana needs to keep saving Rufus’s life.

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2293 Words | 10 Pages

The reason why Alice is that the chosen hero is unconcealed when the speaker says that Alice was a “curious kid [who was] terribly keen on pretense to be 2 people” (Carroll,1993, p.23). Alice may be a girl of seven years recent who has the tendency to go looking for meanings from her surroundings. From the terribly starting, she expresses a keen curiosity about growing up and adulthood. Once she was sitting by her sister on the bank, she peeped into the book her sister was reading; to her nice disappointment, she found there were no photos or conversations in it. Her surprise concerning that means of adult’s book suggests her curiosity concerning the adult world, that she believes may be a universe quite totally different from hers.

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780 Words | 4 Pages

But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”. It is however true that Alice has created these events and these characters in her dream world and they don’t necessarily symbolize her emotional condition. They can simply be figments of her imagination and constitute a natural response to her confusion about adulthood and growing up. The

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