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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,
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
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.
In Octavia Butler’s novel "Kindred," A young African-American woman writer named Dana who is married to a white man named Kevin whom is also a writer. Dana is pulled back into time during the 19th century. Dana comes face to face with many obstacles and is forced to deal with her "people’s past" (Harris) until she returns to her present day life in California. Throughout the book; Dana continues to save Rufus, her ancestor, and slowly begins to accept slavery in order to survive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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
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.
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.
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.
Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, is a great portrayal of humans and their struggles. This