Importance Of Slavery In Kindred

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Recommended: Slavery literature review

Kim Duong
Professor Goyal
Eng M104D
May 5, 2014
Dana’s Consent to Slavery: A Different Perspective
Octavia Butler’s, Kindred, addresses slavery in a contemporary, yet historical setting. In traditional slave narratives, the time period is set to nearly a hundred years back, but in this book, through her usage of time-travel to merge the present with the past, she allows the audience to have a closer connection to both the characters and the content. This happens because readers go through the journey with the main character, Dana, in a relatable fashion.
The first time Dana time travels back into the slave era and meets Rufus, she is completely confused by what is happening. He is found unconscious, she saves his life, and she returns back to the present time—that is all she knows. Kevin demands, “What the hell… how did you get over there?” She responds, “I don’t know”(14). Starting the novel with this framework allows one to understand and identify with the strangeness and confusion of the whole situation. She is not anymore familiar with the past than we are as readers. Because of this, we are able to catch the nuances of her transformation and character development during her trips. We learn that there is more to the struggle against slavery than the outright civil war and physical resistance.
At the beginning, Dana is expressively defiant against the conventions of the slave period. This is shown after Kevin accidentally returns to the past with Dana and Rufus squeals upon finding out they are married, “Niggers can’t marry white people!” and Dana responds, “I don’t like that word, remember? Try calling me black or Negro or even colored… Rufe, how’d you like people to call you white trash when they talk to you?” “What?’ He s...

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...ured the reason she could deal with it was because she was just an observer, but one day, she tells Kevin, “But now and then,.. I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do… I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery”(101). She and Kevin even develop a view of Rufus’ house as their home. Their present becomes their past and readers can effortlessly visualize the predicament.
While traditional historical accounts of slavery leave a wall between the account and their readers because we view it as something not relatable in the distant past, Kindred breaks down the barrier of space and time to show readers the complicated dynamics of slavery. Of course, it does not justify it, but deepens one’s understanding of the situation and relationships between the master and slave.

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