ipl-logo

The Theme Of The Past In Octavia Butler's Kindred

1003 Words5 Pages

Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, connects the past to the present through Dana and Kevin time traveling back to an era of slavery. The theme of time is essential throughout the novel, especially to Dana and Kevin’s survival and who they are as people. Both Dana and Kevin begin to comprehend that what has happened in the past is gone but never forgotten. Although slavery is no longer legal today, we are living in its ramifications. Butler emphasizes the theme that the past and the present cannot easily be distinguished and are consistently related.
Butler begins the phrase, “And I lost about a year of my life [...],” with a conjunction. In school we are normally taught not to start a sentence with this conjunction; however Butler breaks that …show more content…

After what Dana and Kevin have experienced, they both realize that they will never be able to go back to living the way they used to. They both find it difficult to readjust after returning home. They expect that things will return back to normal but soon realize that their “old” normal is now “gone.” They will never be able to live like they did post-time travel. They begin to grasp the reality of this while visiting the present day Weylin plantation when Dana says, “I touched the scar Tom Weylin’s boot had left on my face, touched my empty sleeve” (264). Present day Dana has one arm and a scar that will constantly be a reminder of what took place in the past. This is yet another indicator of how the past and present are tied …show more content…

Dana starts to lose her comfort and security when she says, “Today and yesterday didn’t mesh. I felt almost as strange as I had after my first trip back to Rufus-- caught between his home and mine” (115). Dana can be torn away from the “comfort and security” of her home and husband at any point. That discomfort and vulnerability Dana starts feeling begins to mess with her identifying between past and present. We often see past and present as being easily recognizable when in reality they are not as concrete as they

Show More
Related

Kindred By Octavia E. Butler: Literary Analysis

823 Words | 4 Pages

This quote is important because this is the first time the reader sees Dana begin to doubt herself in modern environment. She realizes that Kevin’s experience in the eighteen hundreds took a major toll on his personality. Dana could not do much because she did not know what it was like being in that time period for so long. Dana blamed herself for the whole situation. She thought that it was her fault for Kevin’s struggle to write again.

Read More

Christine Butler Quotes

407 Words | 2 Pages

When they start beating the black man I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath…..” A factor that also related to Dana past reflecting on the present is her mixed feelings and emotions between her traveling to these two time periods. As for Christine, her past has become a stronger reality. Even

Read More

Megan Catalano's Use Of Strategies In Writing A Personal Essay

1597 Words | 7 Pages

Writers use strategies in personal essays to make a connection to readers. Even though readers aren’t necessarily right next to the writer, writers write their personal essays as if the reader were there. They are able to reveal their deepest thoughts within their writing, as readers can relate to it. Phillip Lopate states the importance of strategies in his anthology, “The Art of the Personal Essay.” In his anthology, Lopate mentions that the use of strategies used in personal essays are similar; however, those strategies can portray different themes that the author doesn’t state.

Read More

Analyzing Character Development In Octavia Butler's Kindred '

1936 Words | 8 Pages

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

Read More

'Slavery Exposed In Octavia Butler's Kindred'

996 Words | 4 Pages

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.

Read More

Bloodchild Octavia Butler Character Analysis

951 Words | 4 Pages

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.

Read More

Powerlessness In Lord Of The Flies

1217 Words | 5 Pages

Powerful or Powerless The novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding is an interesting novel that shows many different circumstances that happen to civilization, for better or for worse, through the actions of children. Ralph, the main character, opens the novel up with Piggy. The two boys are strolling through the woods on this island that they have been stranded on. They had survived a horrible plane crash, fleeing the land that they came from, hoping to find somewhere safer to stay.

Read More

Kindred By Octavia Butler: Literary Analysis

642 Words | 3 Pages

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

Read More

Trauma In Octavia Butler's Kindred

1674 Words | 7 Pages

One traumatic moment. One horrifying event. That is all it takes to alter a life. Trauma is when the mind’s coping mechanism becomes too overwhelmed by shocking events, to be able to process anything else (Walker 317). In Kindred, by Octavia Butler, the female, Black, protagonist, Dana, undergoes a series of traumatic events as she travels back in time to the 1800s – a period of slavery in America.

Read More

The Fight For Freedom In Octavia Butler's Kindred

1598 Words | 7 Pages

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.

Read More

Embodied Agency In Octavia Butler's Kindred

886 Words | 4 Pages

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.

Read More

Essay On The Character Struggle In Octavia Butler's Fledgling

667 Words | 3 Pages

Imagine waking up in complete darkness and not knowing who or where you are. That was the problem that Shori, the main character in “Fledgling”, faced at the beginning of the novel. After figuring out she had become an Ina (similar to a vampire) and finding her father, Shori and her symbionts (co-dependent humans) move into a community with other Ina’s. Soon after she moves in, several Ina’s plan to kill Ina because she is genetically modified. Shori has human melanin, making her skin dark and allowing her to move around freely in the daylight.

Read More

Education In Octavia Butler's Kindred

1843 Words | 8 Pages

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

Read More

Theme Of The Book Of Martha Octavia Butler

1772 Words | 8 Pages

In The Book of Martha Octavia Butler places the reader in the middle of a conversation with God. There are only two characters in the story, and the theme is Martha’s annoyed tête-à-tête with God. Martha is given the option of saving the world. The rules of this arrangement are Martha can make one change and whatever the results, she must occupy the bottom stair. She must make a decision concerning the entire earth; nevertheless she must first overcome her fears and personal views of God.

Read More

Comparing The Relationship In Octavia E. Butler's Kindred

853 Words | 4 Pages

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.

Read More

More about The Theme Of The Past In Octavia Butler's Kindred

Related Topics

Open Document