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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

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