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Slavery In Octavia Butler's Kindred

687 Words3 Pages

“I closed my eyes again remembering the way I had been hurt—remembering the pain.” (Butler 20) Dana, the main character in Octavia Butler’s Kindred stated this quote to emphasize the great amount of pain she has experienced in her life, and how focusing and remembering the pain keeps her from losing her grip on reality. Dana, takes the reader in a journey back to the slave period through the antebellum south and allows the reader to travel time through the eyes of a modern African-American woman and experience all the heartache and misery she experienced during those times. Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Kindred explores not only the unimaginable horrors of slavery; but how those horrors and the time travel affects everyone. Dana, the main character of this novel …show more content…

Dana visits Rufus in moments where she needs to save his life, and returns to the 20th century when she senses her life is in danger. Throughout Dana’s journey of time travel she encounters several moments where she deeply considers saving Rufus’ life or simply letting him die. Examples would be when he sends Dana to the cornfields and whips her, when he sells Joe and Hagar, Alice’s children to a slave trader, and lastly when he attempts to rape Dana. Dana is cautious with Rufus’s life because he is one of her ancestors and if he dies she would cease to exist, however after he attempts to rape her she’s had enough and she stabs him to death. “Dana lives in that time to help herself live in her own time. She adjusts to the peculiar situation with an unsteady determination, even through the worst that slavery had to offer to human beings.” (Kevin Weston) Even though Dana suffered greatly, she was able to better understand what her ancestors went through and it surely made her a

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Dana's Life Exposed In Kindred By Octavia Butler

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Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is a science fiction time travel novel, but Kindred is not like other science fiction novels. The book is told in first person by the main character Dana, a modern day black woman as she travels between her time 1976, and the antebellum South. When Dana transports to the antebellum South she is forced to endure slavery and the violence and abuse that comes along with it. As we read further into the book we see Dana’s life and relationships change because of the time travel. Dana is first introduced to us a Dana's last visit to the past brings us full circle; when she must murder Rufus to fend off his attempt to rape her, he grasps her arm as she is sent forward in time, anchoring her arm in the past.

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Kindred By Octavia E. Butler: Literary Analysis

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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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A Lesson Before Dying And Kindred: Literary Analysis

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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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Kindred By Octavia E. Butler: Character Analysis

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“It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery,”--or so Rufus’s neighbors claim as they observe his liability of allowing slaves to have even the slightest form of education. In the novel, Kindred, composed by Octavia E. Butler, Dana strives to maintain agency, or power over situations and personal encounters, as she navigates the Antebellum South after being miraculously teleported through time. While exploring this oppressive society, Dana turns to using knowledge from 1976, the time era she came from, in order to gain agency over others who automatically have more power than her, such as Rufus, the son of a plantation owner she is tasked with helping.

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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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Kindred By Octavia Butler: Literary Analysis

1204 Words | 5 Pages

The novel Kindred by Octavia Butler examines issues of racism and slavery throughout America by depicting an African American woman named Dana who, through forced time travel, finds herself in the antebellum south. This story focuses on the violence, exploitation, and abuse of black people in the past. However, through Dana and Kevin's relationship, the novel speculates on the systemic impact racism has systemically on contemporary society. This is highlighted through the struggles present within their interracial marriage and how their dynamics parallel the racism present throughout the book. Kindred explores the ways in which systemic racism has affected and continues to impact society.

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'Slavery Exposed In Octavia Butler's Kindred'

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In the story “Kindred” by Octavia Butler the slaves hardly fought back. The book showed that the slave owners as a whole weren't the entire problem, society was. No matter how much the slaves fought against it in their personal lives it was still widely accepted and enforced. The slaves had virtually no rights and were seen as sub human even when they were freed. Every part of society was against them and fighting back did much more harm than good.

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Racism Exposed In Octavia E. Butler's Kindred

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In Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, Dana battles an external conflict of time traveling to the past, and experiencing what it was like to be a slave. Dana ultimately resolves this conflict by killing her ancestor named Rufus to return to her present time; however, this choice also illustrates her true character as both scared but brave. Dana’s decision to kill Rufus because she did not want to live in a time where slavery and racism occurred also reveals the universal theme that racism was very common in the past, and it still occurs till this day. When traveling to the past Dana struggles with an external conflict of racism and slavery.

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As an African America, Dana is forced into the life of a slave, suffering through various hardships and numerous close encounters with death. All of these experiences have a significant effect on Dana’s mental stability, as she becomes more and more distant and distressed. However, her fellow characters are unable to fully realize Dana’s state of

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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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Kindred Commentary

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Dana was a positive part of Rufus’s environment because she was the one who really helped him through the good and the bad. Dana tried to help Rufe reach a realization that slavery was clearly wrong and tried . But in the end not much changed. “What’s he done to you?” ‘Sent me to a field, had me beaten, made me spend nearly eight months sleeping on the floor of his mother’s room, sold people. . .

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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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