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Analysis of kindred by octavia butler
Analysis of kindred by octavia butler
Analysis of kindred by octavia butler
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In the story, Kindred, an African American woman named Dana is transported back in time to save her uncle from death. However, Dana faces a moral dilemmas that lead her to change the lives of the people around her. Dana must choose to let Rufus die and stop the abusive acts he commits, or to let Rufus live in order to protect the other people who live on the farm. If Dana chooses to live, the abuse towards her and Alice will continue. The abusive acts Rufus does has both a physical and social effect on Alice and Dana. Because Rufus gets abusive if Alice refuses to have sex with him, she has no choice but to continue along. Also, Dana will receive punishment because she refuses to cater to Rufus’ wishes. But if Dana lets Rufus live, the families,
such as Carrie and Nigel, on the plantations will not get separated ensuring that they live “happily ever after”. On the other hand, if Dana lets Rufus die, these will stop the abuse towards Alice, Dana, and other people on the farm. However, this decision will also has a negative effect.
Moral ambiguity is lack of sense in ethical decision-making. This means morally ambiguous characters are difficult to classify as either good or evil, as they contain strong aspects of both. These types of characters generally have real problems, causing their inner conflicts, which also makes them sympathetic. Stories that have morally ambiguous characters usually create built-in tension, because there is always the question of whether their conniving nature will be able to take hold, causing them to fail in their pursuit. In the play The Crucible, an example of a morally ambiguous character is Mary Warren.
Rose Mary was able to get her family to live with her husband’s parents but the children’s security was now jeopardized. This is because Rose Mary fails to acknowledge the negative acts of sexual abuse committed against her daughter Jeanette by her husband’s brother Stanley. In the book it states, “Mom asked if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. ‘Well, there you go,’ she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. ‘If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t,’ she said. ‘So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But your stronger than that.’ She went back to her crossword puzzle.”(Walls 184). In this unexpected share of dialogue, the collision between perspectives begins and tension builds between Jeanette and Rose Mary Walls. Not only does Rose Mary Walls disregards Jeanette’s feeling and trauma, she sets up her position on sexual abuse for any hypothetical future situations with her other children. The acts within these moments of the memoir demonstrate Rose Mary’s unreasonable and detrimental perception on sexual abuse and ultimately she provides no support for Jeanette and places a harmful neglect on Jeanette’s feelings.. As the narrative progresses, Rose Mary Walls decides to share more of what she believes and her perspective on
Some people believe that everyone is born with morality, some people say it is learned. No matter which way morals are given, almost everyone has them. In the novel, Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card constantly brings up the topic of morality. Many years in the future the main character Ender is meant to save the world. He has to make multiple difficult decisions and many of them make him question his morals. Throughout the book, some of the decisions Ender makes are the right choice, but also hurt others. People will often compromise their morals in service for the greater good.
Kindred by Octavia Butler is an incredible book that leaves the reader hypnotized. This story educates people on the first hand abuse of slavery. Butler took a woman of the modern era and transferred her back into a period in which she, like the rest of us only heard about in books and television. Octavia Butler depicts how trauma not only affects the slave 's, but the slaveholders. Butler also brings attention to adaptation in her work by using a key literary devices such as foreshadowing to expose the trauma and the cause of that trauma.
Alice and Kevin have an interesting start to their relationship. Initially, it appears that Dana is not interested in Kevin, as she tries to reject communication and his advances through buying her lunch. This distance on Dana’s part allows readers to contemplate whether Dana is put off by Kevin’s obtrusive attitude because he is a man, because he is white, or a combination of the two. As the novel advances, Butler continues to focus Kevin’s faults in his marriage because of his identity as a white man.
The 1992 winner of the best movie of the year, Unforgiven, is viewed by many to clash with the society of 1992 involving certain aspects of feminism and racism just to name two. This movie won four academy awards including best picture, best supporting actor, best director, and best editing but it was actually nominated for nine which is pretty phenomenal considering the amount of money it cost to make the film. In this movie, morality is in question throughout the whole film, as well as the power money actually has on people. The plot of Unforgiven focuses on the character William Munny (Clint Eastwood), who gave up his life as a thief, murderer, and villain for the love of a woman and to raise the family they were soon to have. Unlike most other movies of that era, Unforgiven didn’t seem to have a good ending with the death of Ned Logan played by Morgan Freeman and certain other factors that will be mentioned later.
Black and white, right and wrong; do decisions that simple and clear even exist? Does a decision ever mean gaining everything without giving anything up? Many characters in To Kill A Mockingbird are forced to make difficult, heart wrenching decisions that have no clear right answer. Harper Lee presents many of these important decisions in To Kill A Mockingbird as ethical dilemmas, or situations that require a choice between two difficult alternatives. Both of these alternatives have unpleasant aspects and question morals and ethics. A person is put in an awkward position, with their mind saying contradicting things. These dilemmas are presented in many different ways. The decisions in the beginning of the book are simple and can be solved quite easily, yet they are symbolic of later decisions. Other dilemmas place adult-like decisions in the lap of a child. One dilemma concerned a man burdened with the strict traditions of the South. Then there are the two biggest dilemmas, Atticus' decision to take the case and Heck Tate's choice between truth and the emotional well being of a man. Lee's ingenious storyline is established by these crucial and mentally arduous choices faced by the characters.
The history of slavery in America is one that has reminders of the institution and its oppressive state of African Americans in modern times. The slaveholders and the slaves were intertwined in a cruel system of oppression that did not yield to either side. The white slaveholders along with their black slaves became codependent amongst each other due to societal pressures and the consequences that would follow if slaves were emancipated with race relations at a high level of danger. This codependency between the oppressed and the oppressor has survived throughout time and is prevalent in many racial relationships. The relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor can clearly be seen in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. In this novel, the protagonist Dana Franklin, a black woman, time travels between her present day 1977 and the antebellum era of 19th century Maryland. Throughout her journeys back to the past, Dana comes in contact with her white ancestor, Rufus Weylin, a white slave owner and Dana ultimately saves his life and intermingles with the people of the time. Butler’s story of Dana and her relationship with Rufus and other whites as she travels between the past and the present reveals how slaveholders and slaves depended on and influenced one other throughout the slaves bondage. Ultimately, the institution of slavery reveals how the oppressed and the oppressor are co-dependent; they need each other in order to survive.
Dana and Rufus’ relationship consists of them both having safety in each other. One of the first times Dana travels back in time to the 1800’s she begins to contemplate why she continues
Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality” includes his theory on man’s development of “bad conscience.” Nietzsche believes that when transitioning from a free-roaming individual to a member of a community, man had to suppress his “will to power,” his natural “instinct of freedom”(59). The governing community threatened its members with punishment for violation of its laws, its “morality of customs,” thereby creating a uniform and predictable man (36). With fear of punishment curtailing his behavior, man was no longer allowed the freedom to indulge his every instinct. He turned his aggressive focus inward, became ashamed of his natural animal instincts, judged himself as inherently evil, and developed a bad conscience (46). Throughout the work, Nietzsche uses decidedly negative terms to describe “bad conscience,” calling it ugly (59), a sickness (60), or an illness (56); leading some to assume that he views “bad conscience” as a bad thing. However, Nietzsche hints at a different view when calling bad conscience a “sickness rather like pregnancy” (60). This analogy equates the pain and suffering of a pregnant woman to the suffering of man when his instincts are repressed. Therefore, just as the pain of pregnancy gives birth to something joyful, Nietzsche’s analogy implies that the negative state of bad conscience may also “give birth” to something positive. Nietzsche hopes for the birth of the “sovereign individual” – a man who is autonomous, not indebted to the morality of custom, and who has regained his free will. An examination of Nietzsche’s theory on the evolution of man’s bad conscience will reveal: even though bad conscience has caused man to turn against himself and has resulted in the stagnation of his will, Ni...
In the middle of the night, four white men storm into a cabin in the woods while four others wait outside. The cabin belongs to Alice and her mom. The four men pull out Alice’s father along with her mom, both are naked. Alice manages to scramble away. The men question Alice’s father about a pass, which allows him to visit his wife. Her father tries to explain the men about the loss of the pass but the men do not pay any attention to him. Instead they tie him to a tree and one of the white man starts to whip him for visiting his wife without the permission of Tom Weylin, the “owner” of Alice’s father. Tom Weylin forbid him to see his wife, he ordered him to choose a new wife at the plantation, so he could own their children. Since Alice’s mother is a free woman, her babies would be free as well and would be save from slavery. But her freedom “status” does not stop one of the patroller to punch her in the face and cause her to collapse to the ground.
How far would you go to do the right thing if it had the potential to hurt you in the long run? In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird, that was a question that the characters had to ask themselves when they knew they had to do the right thing but did not know how far they should go. In the novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee demonstrates moral courage throughout the book by using the literary elements such as conflict and characterization.
A girl was being bullied, and had sat on the curb and sobbed into her knees. Suddenly, a boy sees this young girl in agony, and finds the courage to comfort her despite of what his peers might say about the situation. Through his words were few, to her it meant many. Moral courage is the ability to stand up for what one believes in. To Kill a Mockingbird written by Harper Lee takes place in a small town in Maycomb County of Alabama. In such an area during the 1930s, the people living there were prejudice, sexist, and had set male and female roles. In addition to this, not only was society at a low but this area suffered from an economic low known as the Great Depression. However, despite all this, Harper Lee effectively uses “To Kill a Mockingbird”
In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a main topic explored is innate human nature. throughout the book the personalities of characters is explained by their upbringing,however; the chemicals responsible for all emotion are present in all people’s brains, thus it can be inferred that all people innately posses the potential to exert these emotions. As seen in main characters such as Dana and Rufus, it is also seen in the many secondary characters such as Alice and Tom Weylin. A person's probability to exert these emotions is dependent on the person's environment.
Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, is a great portrayal of humans and their struggles. This