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Octavia butler's kindred analysis
Research essay focusing on Octavia Butler's Kindred
Research essay focusing on Octavia Butler's Kindred
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Kindred
How far would someone go to survive? All through life people go through various challenges, but when someone is facing death, how far would someone will they go to save oneself? Survival can mean many different things; such as making it through highschool without getting into trouble, fighting off a predator, or standing up for what is right to help others. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uses many different situations to show what survival means to her. For example, Dana, the main character, travels through time to save her ancestor Rufus thus experiencing times of near death predicaments. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uses the conflicts Dana experiences in her time travels to suggest the idea that people do things they wouldn’t normally
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In this scene, Dana leaves the plantation without her husband, Kevin. When SheWhenile she wentas back to the presentthein present time, Kevin got leftgotwas left in 1815 and he decided to head go North. Dana isgets called back to the plantation, since Rufus was putting his life in danger by fighting with Alice’s husband. After being back on the plantation for a while, Dana finds out from Alice that Rufus didn’t send the letters to Kevin as he promised. After thinking long and hard Dana decides to run away. She did not goget far before Rufus and his father found her (108-174). She was punished, “His father strode over and kicked me in the face. I drifted into unconsciousness. I awoke tied hand and foot, my side throbbing rhythmically, my jaw not throbbing at all. The pain there was a steady scream. I probed with my tongue and found that two teeth on the right side were gone” (174). Dana endures all of this pain, loses a lot of blood, and isgets lied to but in the end she is strong enough to survive. All she wanted was to be with her husband, and she was willing to risk her life just to see him her husband again. To some this may seem a stupid thing to risk her life for, but Butler wanted to show that Dana was willing to survive anything just to goget back to her husband and present
Kek, the main character in Katherine Applegate’s Home of The Brave, struggles to find belonging as a Sudanese refugee living in Minnesota. Kek tries to help hope win the battle between fear, and successfully, during Part Two of the story, Kek begins to make some forward progress. But Keks cycle of belonging has not ended, and I am sad to say that Kek is still alienated from America as much as he belongs in America.
Initially, because she underestimates her own courage, which has never been properly tested, Dana doubts that she has sufficient fortitude to survive in the nineteenth century. As Kindred unfolds, it becomes clear that she does, indeed, have abundant courage and stamina. Butler effectively utilizes a common technique in fiction whereby an individual becomes heroic by transcending his or her base humanity by drawing on hidden inner resources. Dana is tested in her second trip to the past when she is nearly raped by a white man who is part of a patrol—the forerunner to the Ku Klux Klan. Never before having experienced physical abuse, initially Dana is reluctant to act. She fails to disable him by gouging his eyes, thereby losing her only chance
... seeing and feeling it’s renewed sense of spring due to all the work she has done, she was not renewed, there she lies died and reader’s find the child basking in her last act of domestication. “Look, Mommy is sleeping, said the boy. She’s tired from doing all out things again. He dawdled in a stream of the last sun for that day and watched his father roll tenderly back her eyelids, lay his ear softly to her breast, test the delicate bones of her wrist. The father put down his face into her fresh-washed hair” (Meyer 43). They both choose death for the life style that they could no longer endure. They both could not look forward to another day leading the life they did not desire and felt that they could not change. The duration of their lifestyles was so pain-staking long and routine they could only seek the option death for their ultimate change of lifestyle.
Parable of the Sower is a very well-written science fiction novel by Octavia Butler. The setting is California in the year 2025. The world is no longer prosperous and has turned into a very poor place. There are countless people homeless, jobs are scarce and hard to come by, and very few communities of homes. The few communities that are still occupied have huge walls with barbed wire and laser wire surrounding them.
Kindred by Octavia Butler has been a respected novel since its publication in 1979. In Kindred Butler provides readers with suspense until the last page. It provides readers with two definitions of a home. Home is a place where you feel safe where you have a family to come to when you are having a horrible day at work or at school. Home is a place where you share good and bad times with family and friends. A home is place of stability in your life. A home isn’t a place that you are scared to go to. A home isn’t a place filled with only negative thoughts and hopes. A home is not a place that you endured physical and mental abuse. Dana had a home of stability and a home filled with physical and mental abuse. Dana and her husband Kevin just moved into a new home that they just bought in Los Angeles, California. This is the best birthday gift she could ever receive because before she was living in a congested apartment. This is also the first day she starts to travel back into time to visit her plantation home in the early 1800s in Maryland. The distinctions between Los Angeles and Maryland present the differences in what makes a home.
In the featured article, “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” the author, Judith Butler, writes about her views on what it means to be considered human in society. Butler describes to us the importance of connecting with others helps us obtain the faculties to feel, and become intimate through our will to become vulnerable. Butler contends that with the power of vulnerability, the rolls pertaining to humanity, grief, and violence, are what allows us to be acknowledged as worthy.
“How could it feel so good when it should be disgusting and painful?” (Butler 75) These words spoken by Theodora, an elderly white woman, about her symbiotic and sometimes sexual relationship with Shori, a black “elfin little girl” (Butler 75), express the societal fear that Octavia Butler exposes in her characterization of Shori as a monster. Shori is a monster because her very existence is a testament to the blurring of historically concrete lines. She is androgynous, vampire and human, black and white, a child with adult strength and urges. Shori’s relationship with her human symbionts and other Ina usually defies normal standards of behavior and acceptance by using pleasure instead of pain as a mechanism of control and abandoning traditional ideas about gender, sexuality, and crossbreeding.
Misery, trauma, and isolation all have connections to the war time settings in “The Thing in the Forest.” In the short story, A.S. Byatt depicts elements captured from both fairy tale and horror genres in war times. During World War II, the two young girls Penny and Primrose endure the 1940s Blitz together but in different psychological ways. In their childhood, they learn how to use gas masks and carry their belongings in oversized suitcases. Both Penny and Primrose suffer psychologically effects by being isolated from their families’ before and after the war. Byatt depicts haunting effects in her short story by placing graphic details on the girls’ childhood experiences. Maria Margaronis, an author of a critical essay entitled “Where the Wild Things Are,” states that “Byatt’s tales of the supernatural depend on an almost hallucinatory precision for their haunting effects.” The hallucinatory details Byatt displays in her story have an almost unbelievable psychological reality for the girls. Penny and Primrose endure the psychological consequences and horrifying times during the Blitz along with the magical ideas they encounter as children. As adults they must return to the forest of their childhood and as individuals and take separate paths to confront the Thing, acknowledge its significance in their childhoods, and release themselves from the grip of the psychological trauma of war.
The book follows Dana who is thrown back in time to live in a plantation during the height of slavery. The story in part explores slavery through the eye of an observer. Dana and even Kevin may have been living in the past, but they were not active members. Initially, they were just strangers who seemed to have just landed in to an ongoing play. As Dana puts it, they "were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors." (Page 98). The author creates a scenario where a woman from modern times finds herself thrust into slavery by account of her being in a period where blacks could never be anything else but slaves. The author draws a picture of two parallel times. From this parallel setting based on what Dana goes through as a slave and her experiences in the present times, readers can be able to make comparison between the two times. The reader can be able to trace how far perceptions towards women, blacks and family relations have come. The book therefore shows that even as time goes by, mankind still faces the same challenges, but takes on a reflection based on the prevailing period.
While showing how brave and unselfish she was, she also showed that she was fragile and not as strong as she used to be. “A black dog with a lolling tongue came up out of the weeds by the ditch. She was meditating, and not ready, and when he came at her she only hit him a little with her cane. Over she went in the ditch, like a little puff of milkweed.” Even though she hit the dog only a little, it caused her to fall into a ditch. At last there came a flicker and then a flame of comprehension across her face, and she spoke. "My grandson. It was my memory had left me. There I sat and forgot why I made my long trip." This shows how her mind went blank, causing her to forget why she had made the journey.
Beowulf risk his life for populace numerous of times. Beowulf went to help a person that wasn’t even art of his society knowing that he might die but he didn’t care because the daredevil inside of him would not go out without a fight. Beowulf fought the monster Grendel without arms knowing that it may not work but at the
In the short story “The Reach,” Stephen King addresses the fact that in life there is a constant fear of death, but when confronted with it is easier to accept when someone has seen many deaths and knows that they are dying themselves. The narrator of the story knows that she is dying and, being an elder, has seen many deaths. We reach this conclusion when she questions the love she has for others and no longer cries when others die around her anymore. She has seen many deaths in the years and can only accept that death is inevitable and a part of life. Mostly everyone she grew up with has passed on already.
The fairytale The Beauty and the Beast is illustrated as a love story, however when looking deeper into Belle’s nature it seems to be that she is affected by several disorders throughout the film. In Beauty and the Beast, we see Disney once again sugarcoat personal problems in order to present a young audience with a one dimensional and simple female hero. Belle has clearly shown symptoms of Schizoid Personality Disorder, Stockholm Syndrome and Schizophrenia which can be treated by a biological therapeutic approach or a psychoactive drug approach and therapy.
The whole issue that Isabella is fighting for is about justice. She beleives her brother was executed for something that should not be considered wrong.
What goes through the minds of those who know they will perish is a phenomenon to the minds of those who have not experienced the dance with death. For some, the moment that they know they will die is mere seconds before their own tragic ending, and others know long before it will happen. It is in these stretches of time that will test our intellect of our mind, body, and world when the time comes to know if we have truly lived. One definition of “living” is stated, “full of life of vigor”, which John Keats exhibited to the extreme. (Merriam-Webster) John Keats, world-renowned poet, knew his end was coming and he aspired to transcribe his thoughts into words on a page; it is with these words in which we, those who lack the experience of knowing