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Octavia Butler's Kindred: Literary Analysis

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Imagine being a modern African American woman, and all of the sudden you start feeling dizzy, and wake up in 1815. Not only you don’t know how you got there, but also you don’t know how you are going to get back home. Later, you realize that you are there to save the life of a slave owner’s child. The child you are trying to protect, end us up being a relative of yours. In the novel “Kindred” by Octavia Butler, includes the main character Dana, a modern colored woman that overcomes many obstacles as she experiences slavery. As a result, it leads her to fight for her own life in order to survive in the 1800’s. Through Dana’s experience, it helps readers understand, and realize that slavery was not an easy time in our country’s history and demonstrates …show more content…

The fact that this story mainly takes place in a plantation in Maryland, back in the 1800’s, shows how people didn’t see all races the same. During the 1800’s was back when white people acted more superior than the colored people, who were treated differently just because of their skin color. They were labeled, treated unequally, and abused, all because of their skin color. In the novel Kindred, Tom Weylin along with his son Rufus Weylin, both were very strict with their slaves. They would mistreat them and whip them, without feeling bad at all. This demonstrates how their power had no limits on how far they could go on treating someone badly, especially their slaves. They both take advantage of their power to get what they want, and to make someone’s life …show more content…

She also believes that Octavia Butler focused more on using science fiction (time travel) in the beginning of the book to make it the main problem first, before introducing the actual historical problems, such as slavery. Yaszek mentions, “When Rufus’s gun-wielding father appears, she returns to her own world in an equally sudden manner”. This means that Dana couldn’t believe what was going on, it felt very unreal to her.
The main character Dana forgets throughout the story that her actions may have an effect on others around her, such as her husband Kevin. Yaszek believes that Dana failed at understanding that there was always consequences for every decision she made because she was the one who basically controlled her time traveling. The book ends by Rufus attempting to rape Dana, but she manages to kill him first and returns back home to California, which also ends with her time-traveling experiences.

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Dana experienced grief, loss, and anger, due to the way Weylin, the slave owner and Rufus’s father, treated African Americans. To make matters worse, Dana unintentionally brought his husband, Kevin, back in time with her and left

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Rufus loves Dana in a possessive and oppressive way. Butler uses diction with Rufus who does not ask Dana to stay, but demands it instead. He sees her as part of his property, and believes he can control her with violence, like the rest of his slaves. Rufus at this point is very dangerous because he can no longer be changed. He is conditioned to use violence when he does not get what he wants, like most slave owners in the Antebellum south.

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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 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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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

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Rufus no longer understands the difference between friend and master at the loss of Alice. Dana was able to make the selfish decision of killing Rufus, rather than submitting herself, for the good of herself, not the good of anyone else. She could not stand to become like Alice, a slave at the hands of a master; thus, her determination to escape stemmed from her will to remain independent. She knows as soon as she lets herself submit to the will of this society she cannot be viewed as a person, but a tool. Dana represents the women in the current day and age that would do anything to protect their own freedom, even at the

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Douglass stated, “What am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow-men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?” He successfully expresses his pain and anger in this quote by providing images of his and his people’s suffering. He tapped into the emotions of his audience, such as mothers, workers, and those who have felt physically pain by exposing them to the amplified struggles he and others had to face. Nonetheless, he continually reminded the audience, both explicitly and subliminally, that his group of people are too human, and that the only difference they share is the color of their skin. He is pleading his cases and hoping that it gets across to his audience in hope they will do the right

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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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The white people viewed slaves as sub-human, and a black woman who was mentally superior was not something they would have encountered before. Dana explains what Margaret, Tom’s wife, may have been feeling; “I don’t think Margaret likes educated slaves any better than her husband does…. He can barely read and write. And she’s not much better” (Butler 82).

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