Analysis Of Kindred By Octavia Butler

In Octavia Butler's Kindred, the story is not just about time travel, but more like the idea of a modern 20th century protagonist that uses time travel as a vessel to carry out the main idea. The main idea is to shed a light on the atrocities of slavery in the 19th century United States. Butler wants her readers to feel how a modern audience can learn about the hardships that black people went through during slavery by using a time travelling, black, and woman protagonist.

Conversely, some people may argue that Kindred is a novel just shown to . Their argument being that having Dana going back to the past, was to show the readers the reality of slavery. However, if what they say is true, then Butler did not have to set Dana as a time traveler. Subsequently, Butler wrote her book in this way to really hone in on the effect on having a 20th century women live out a 19th century society. Subsequently, Butler

could have written this this book to really immerse the audience in the experience of a 20th century woman living in the 19th century; instead of just stating the atrocities of slavery, Butler wanted to present how a person who was transported into a time of slavery would react.
The use of modern characters can help the modern audience relate to the book more.

The fact that Butler decided to write this in a first person point of view helps a lot in contrast to a third person point of view novel.. In an anecdote, Butler remembers a fellow white classmate wanted to kill off generations of African Americans even though he knew about black history because “he didn’t feel it in his gut” (Crossley 270). This turned into Butler’s motive to write Kindred later on. Also, slavery can be shown on our own elementary playgrounds, where kids bully and segregate their play groups by difference, or even skin tones if the children have been exposed to that already. On the playground, and in the real world, it starts there at “the beginning of hierarchal behaviour that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all other ‘isms’ that cause so much suffering in the world” (NPR Essay 8). Even Rufus later mentions about one of Dana’s slave abolitionist books and comments, “Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?” (Kindred

140).
Butler’s novel is a good example of how people can fall into the regularities of salvery. When Dana refers to her workplace as a “slave market” (Kindred 52), it shows how even Dana, as a modern black person, doesn’t realize how much of a magnitude the word slave market carries. One of the most notable example being when Dana said, “I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show” (Kindred 98). By saying they were observers and calling their dilemma a “show”, it implies that they have already accepted what was happening in front of them