Analysis Of `` Kindred `` By Octavia E. Butler

Language has an effect on everyone; it can be used to help and to hurt others. .In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Dana, one of the main characters, can time travel back the Antebellum South to different points in her ancestor's life. Rufus Weylin her ancestor owns slaves. Octavia Butler uses Dana’s place in the Antebellum South to show how language affects the slaves and their owners. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uses Dana’s experiences in the Antebellum South to portray the strength of language and it’s ability to empower and celebrate others or to control and manipulate others. In doing so, Butler shows how language can be used to both debilitate and celebrate the slaves and how language can also be used to strengthen the slave owners and to humble them.

"By and By" by Amy Bloom is told through a first-person narrative from the perspective of the deceased protagonist's roommate. Though the narrator shifts in and out of past and present tense, the story is simple. Anne (the protagonist) went on a camping trip with her boyfriend Teddy, and Eugene Trask (the antagonist) suddenly appeared to murder Teddy, then he kidnapped Anne, resulting in her missing for four days. In the end, Eugene tried to rape her near Lake Pleasant, and when she tried to defend herself, it gave Eugene a reason to turn and kill her instead. Her body was found near an old mine near Speculator by two kids searching for

In Kindred, by Olivia Butler a main character name Dana traveled back in time where she battled the face of inequalities. Danas journey back to the past is to help the readers understand what African-Americans had to experience and what they had to go through as a slave to be a free person. There was a lack of human rights for blacks, blacks were vulnerability with sexual assault and rape. Dana had dealt with her own experiences has being a slave with discrimination from Rufus, rape, racism, and abuse. She had self taught herself about slavery which gave her knowledge to prepare herself for what she had coming.

In Kindred by Octavia Butler, Dana is subject to many different wounds all over her body; the more involved Dana becomes in the story the more damaging the wounds are to her everyday function. These wounds, their severity, and their position represent certain emotional and mental scars in Dana made by her travels into the 1800’s.The most severe of these wounds and the bait of the novel, since it is the opening chapter and I am awaiting for this scene throughout the book, is the losing of her left arm. Losing such a vital part of one’s body can be devastating and for some this can be an unsurpassable obstacle, but for Dana is a reminder of her travels, her new found knowledge, and her

Octavia Butler explored the evolution of racial relationships over time and challenged the stereotypical dynamics of these relationships by proving love can exist between races. In her novel, Kindred, the main character was Dana. Dana was an African American woman who was married to Kevin, a white man. She used this relationship to channel interracial relationships in present times. Dana interacted with her ancestor Rufe.

Despite being written in and published in 1979, Octavia Butler’s book Kindred contains messages of racial, gender, and educational equality still ring true. In Kindred, Butler explores not only the issues of race, but those of gender, education, and of how power can corrupt. While race is the main issue of Kindred, it helps to highlight other sub-problems within a race, such as the balance of power, and knowledge. She is able to explore this with the use of time travel as a plot device, and rather than blatantly confronting people for their problems, she uses such characters as Rufus, and Alice, to display those problems. By doing so, Butler is able to paint people as neither good nor bad, but, rather, as human.

“It is the law of love that rules mankind. Had violence, hate ruled us we should have become extinct long ago. And yet the tragedy of it is that so-called civilized man and nations conduct themselves as if the basis of society was violence,”(Gandhi). In this quote Gandhi says the main reasons of love and hate are mankind. As well that both control and destroy a human. However, in the end the human chooses the one they will follow. In the outstanding novel Kindred by Octavia Butler. The protagonist, Dana, faces many love and hate situations as she travels back and forth in time. Accordingly, she begins to question whom is to blame for the love and hate crimes. Love and hate are influenced by mankind, both can be controlled and the pair are conscious decisions.

Even though we have evolved from the brutish ways of slavery and lack of civil rights for African Americans, there are still several instances where we haven’t evolved at all. Kindred, a sci-fi novel by Octavia Butler, is the story of an African-American woman named Dana. During the events of the book, Dana gets sent back in time several times to save her forerunner, a slave owner named Rufus, from dying. At the same time she has to protect herself, since she gets sent back to the antebellum south, where slavery and violent racism is still widespread. While in the antebellum south she has to deal with the constant fear of being caught, sold, or killed by the white slave owners, patrollers, and general white people of the time. She does this

No matter who a person may be, everyone is faced with multiple choices from day to day. Whether the choice be life changing or what to eat for suppertime, there is an impact on the decision maker. Is there a line that must be crossed when making decisions in a life or death situation? In Octavia Butler’s best selling novel, Kindred, the main character, Dana Franklin, comes face to face with numerous decisions affecting her and those around her. In the novel, Dana uncontrollably travels back in time and gives perspective as a young black woman in the antebellum South. The time and place of which she travels to exacerbates her given situation. Each time she travels back in time, she is forced to make a decision. Through seeing her decisions in chronological order, the reader gets an image of how important decisions may be. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uses Dana’s choices in the face of conflict to portray the impact her choices had upon her survival.

Sometimes people have no choice but have to do something they normally don’t do in order to survive. So what is survival? According to the dictionary, survival means the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances. Octavia Butler also explores the word “survival” through the character of Dana Franklin in the novel, Kindred. The main character, Dana Franklin, travels back in time to the antebellum South and takes the role of slave and rescues her master, Rufus whenever he gets in trouble. She also meets a variety of people. When Dana wants to go back to her home, she has to take the risks first. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uses the problems Dana experiences in her time

from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, focusing on twentieth-century novels in English that deal with slave narratives (“Contributors”). Naturally, commenting on Kindred then is well within her realm of research. In her article on Kindred she furthers the shift from talking primarily about Kindred and how it relates to history by concluding on how Butler addresses a “crisis of representation” (Flagel 217). Like LaCroix, Flagel mentions the way Butler plays with time, but then she departs from that subject in favor of explaining writing’s role in representation, which so far hasn’t been discussed as much in the scholarship on Kindred, as would be expected, given that there are very few black women science fiction authors. However, Flagel doesn’t merely talk about representation in regards to diversity, she probes it deeper asking how pain, violence and similar traumatic realities must be mediated through visual or literary communication (Flagel 229,

Octavia Butler’s Dawn explores a world of the unknown after humans nearly destroy their kind along with Earth, causing an extraterrestrial species to intervene. The protagonist, Lilith, finds herself in a predicament as she is captured and locked in solidarity for a long. The extraterrestrial species that intervenes, Oankali, strip her of her clothes, mysteriously cut her and then tell her it is her role to mother a group of humans and prepare them for a return to Earth. In the novel Lilith is conflicted, she knows she has no control of her body and that humans have been “enslaved” by the Oankali but begins to trust and connect with them, especially Nikanj. Through the relationship of Lilith and Nikanj side by side with Humans and the Oankali, Octavia Butler explores the monstrous aspects of people and acts within the cultures.

Should Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” be classified as a slave story? The author claims that “Bloodchild” is not a tale of slavery, but rather a love story and a coming-of-age tale. Does “Bloochild” conform to the conventions of the slave stories, love stories, or coming-of-age tales with which you are familiar? What other classifications—in terms of literary genre, form, or mode—apply to “Bloodchild”?

As I ripped by arm from its plaster prison, I began to feel that strangely familiar sensation, the dizziness. No, it must have been from the pain. I must be delusional. I couldn’t be going back. It wasn’t possible. Rufus was dead. He was dead! I had seen him die with my own two eyes. I had killed him with my own two hands. I couldn’t be going back! He was dead!

Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed is a moving story about a young Native girl’s battle to survive, in coming to terms with the past and in discovering a way to build a brighter future in an atmosphere of social abuse and viciousness. Campbell is the oldest daughter of seven children, and was born in northern Saskatchewan. Within the book, she points out the differences between the Native people and the whites, as well as those of status Indians with non-status Native people. Both whites and full-blooded Native people rejected her due to her designation as a non-status Native, otherwise known as Metis. Filled with a strong feeling of resentment and anger, Campbell’s search for self-identity and her struggle to overcome the poverty, discrimination, and cruelty experienced by Metis individuals are described within the novel. When Campbell was twelve, her mother passed away. As a young girl, she was forced to give up school and take on the role of the mother to her younger siblings. At fifteen years old, Campbell felt obligated to marry in order to prevent her younger brothers and sisters from being taken away from her and her father. Unfortunately, her diligent work and good intentions did not keep her family together. Her spouse, a white, abusive alcoholic, reported her to the welfare authorities, and her siblings were taken away and placed in foster homes. Her husband chose to take his family to Vancouver, where he abandoned her and their newly born child.