Symbolism In Time Travel In Octavia Butler's Kindred

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Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) is a speculative fiction novel about a young black African-American women, Dana Franklin, who can travel back in time to her ancestral past. Each time Dana’s ancestor Rufus, a white, slave-owner, is in danger he summons her from the future to rescue him. As Dana gets pulled back in time without any notice or knowledge, she realises that she has a purpose, that purpose being to preserve Rufus’s lifespan till a stage when it would be safe for her lineage to still exist in future generations. By the second trip, we discover that Dana has absolutely no control over this supernatural force and can only return ‘home’, back to present day, when she fears for her wellbeing. Throughout the entire experience the reader …show more content…

Every slave had a being, purpose and an ordinary lifestyle before they were hauled away from their lives with no explanation and lobbed into slavery, which was what Dana had experienced when she was hauled from her own life suddenly to aid her white predecessor whenever it suited him. Dana’s return to her own time also has a metaphorical symbolism related to slavery as it required her life to be at risk before she could return to ‘home’, present day. That could be connected to slavery and other historical events that we study today, as those situations also had to be brought to the brink of population demise, before anything was done to aid the situation. Time travel is usually associated with dominance, for someone to gain power but for Dana it is about overcoming dominance not getting it. When Dana witnesses life on the plantation first-hand, she gains a new historical context that she could not have gained from texts alone. Dana returns home with emotional and physical scars at the end of her journey as she had seen much more than anyone else from her time by participating in forebear’s lives. She gains a new perspective of history and the present day, and with that gains the ability to accept the past. Dana is no doubt the main character in this novel as it all has to do with her understanding and heredity of the past, but she is also a protagonist in the sense that she was faced with various obstacles such as her race; sexuality and age but yet she surmounted all the hindrances and accomplished what she was meant to do in formidable

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