Speech Sounds By Octavie Butler Summary

Kendall Conner

Ms. Brawner

English Composition II

3 April 2023

Importance of Butler’s Stories Octavie E. Butler, a well known black author, has written many short stories that share just a glimpse of her life. She was born and raised in Pasadena, California by her mother. She began to write science fiction when she was only 12 years old and would submit them into magazines. Butler has won many awards for her works, such as “Speech Sounds”; a story of a black lady trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world. This story is very similar to “Kindred” and Parable of The Sower. The main idea within all of these stories would be that they all share a strong, independent black woman as the protagonist. These stories also share a sense of hope at

Like in "Speech Sounds”, Butler says, “There was no more LAPD, no more any large organization, governmental or private. There were neighborhood patrols and armed individuals. That was all.” (92). This is significant because this relates to the future. They do not have a government to watch over the people anymore. The setting in this story is a dystopian post-apocalyptic world that Rye shares with another character; Lauren. She is a character in Parable of The Sower. In Rebecca Wanzo’s article, it is shown that, “Lauren Olamina is a fifteen-year-old Black girl living in the Los Angeles area in the year 2024” Another one of Butler’s stories placed in the future. In Butler’s story of “Kindred”, It has a different setting than the other two stories. It is shown that Dana is having to face struggles of slavery in order for her rebirth in the 20th century. Carol Kort mentions, “Its heroine, Dana, is a contemporary black woman pulled back in time by her great-great-grandfather, a Southern white plantation owner.” This relates to society in the past because slavery was a major issue that impacted the way that the world is today as one. While all of these stories have a relation to either the past or present, the protagonist’s in these stories have one thing in common;

In “Speech Sounds”, Rye is shown to have given up towards the beginning of the story but that quickly changes. Butler says, “The illness had stripped [Rye], killing her children one by one, killing her husband, her sister, her parents….” (95). This had left Rye with no one, except her brother and his children who lived in Pasadena. This proves that Rye is a strong woman especially with her circumstances of having to survive alone in this crazy world. Lauren is also left to survive in a dystopian world in Parable of The Sower. She suffers from hyperempathy. This is when she can feel an excessive amount of emotions that another person is showing. While having to live with this syndrome, Lauren still can manage a “normal lifestyle”. Wanzo say’s, “In the year 2024, the violence in the United States has escalated to the point that people cannot venture outside of their barricaded communities without weapons and people constantly live with the threats of robbery, rape, assault, and murder.” Even though Lauren can feel the emotions that someone is going through, such as murder, she still manages a way to survive and live in this environment. Dana in “Kindred” is having to survive in an enslaved environment. She is taken back into 1815 as a slave to protect Rufus, her great great-grandfather’s son. As she is faced with this challenge, she learns many different things