This novel starts off on June 9, 1976, in California with an African American Girl named Dana on her 26th birthday with her husband Kevin and are moving into their new home. Kevin has started to unpack his office and Dana is unpacking books. Then Kevin walks out of the office to talk to Dana when Dana all of a sudden starts to get dizzy and Dana then finds herself in a grove of trees thats in the late 1800’s in the state of Maryland by a nearby river when she spots a young boy drowning named Rufus. She then goes into the river to save the unconscious boy. Once the boy has came back to life and she dealt with his mother she reappears back into her apartment. Several minutes later she begins to feel dizzy again and then disappears.
This time Dana finds herself sees Rufus, now a few years older, with his bedroom drapes on fire. Dana then puts out the fire and helps Rufus escape the house. She then runs to the house of Alice Greenwood and her mother. She then gets caught up when a group of white men smash down the door and beat down Alice’s husband and a man tries to rape her but bef...
A Comparison of Butler's Life and Kindred What lies in the mind of an author as he or she begins the long task of writing a fiction novel? This question can be answered if the author's life is studied and then compared to the work itself. Octavia E. Butler's life and her novel Kindred have remarkable comparisons. This essay will point out important events of Butler's life and how they link to the mentioned novel. Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947 in Pasadena, California (Voices
Table of Contents Page 1. A BRIEF CONVERSATION WITH OCTAVIA E. BUTLER Page 2 - 4. Biography Page 5 - 9. Synopsis Page 9 - 14. Analysis of Criticism Page 14 – 15. Influences on Society Page 16. Footnotes Page 17. Bibliography A BRIEF CONVERSATION WITH OCTAVIA E. BUTLER 1. Who is Octavia E. Butler? Where is she headed? Where has she been? Who am I? I'm a 51-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, is a novel about an African American woman named Dana (born in 1950) who lives in 1976 California. She experiences weird headaches and dizziness one day and gets teleported to a river in the woods. She sees a boy drowning and rushes into the river to save him. The boy’s mother comes out yelling at Dana and then the father comes out with a shotgun just as Dana is sent back to her house. Dana kinda sees it as a hallucination and goes on shocked. Later she experiences the
and mind.” This is certainly evident in the science fiction slave narrative Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. One of Butler’s primary reasons for writing Kindred, perhaps subconsciously, may have been to try to receive closure about any white slave-owning ancestors she possibly had in her family tree. Creating the story of Dana Franklin, a modern black woman traveling through time to save her lineage from extinction, allows Butler to illustrate the ways in which some of the oppression that took place during
with a broad range of readers. Unlike factual textbooks, fiction gives characters feeling and emotion, allowing us to see the story behind the basic details. In many cases, readers gain a new perspective on a period of time by examining a fiction novel. In Kindred, by Octavia Butler, the near death experiences of Rufus Weylin transports a 20th century African American woman named Dana to the ante bellum South to experience exactly what it’s like to be a slave. Through her day-to-day life on the
often wonder what would it be like to time travel. Would it be fun or scary? Would they change the past and future or keep it the same? Would it change them as a person or break them? For Dana, one of the main characters of Kindred, she went through all of that. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler is about Dana, an African-American woman, who travels back to the antebellum South to preserve her existence in the present. When she goes into the past, she meets her ancestor Rufus, a white slave owner, and
itself is in danger"(James E. Gunn). James E. Gunn’s definition from Anders’ list is strongest because it incorporates time travel, slavery, and change, as seen in the novel, Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler. It accentuates the significance of the issues that happened in the past in view of race, it ties into the things that most creators consider to be excessively unthinkable,
The novel "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer, he writes about an experience that changes his life when Outside magazine asks him to write an article about the commercialism of Mount Everest, he knew from that moment that he needed to climb the mountain. But of course his expedition does not go as expected. On May 10th Krakauer reaches the summit after a extremely stressful and treacherous trek up, but only to have to scale down the mountain with his team in one of the most dangerous seasons in the
it has a dark history of slavery and racial discrimination, that are still present in the modern day. From the novel, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, Dana is constantly summoned to travel back in time from 1976 to 1800s, to save and protect Rufus, a white son of a plantation owner, who later becomes the father who bores the child who later become Dana’s ancestor. Both the characters, Dana and Rufus struggle to accept each other’s differences of thought because of the difference in the timeline. The
In the novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, Butler tells a story of an African- American woman named Dana who travels from 1976 in California to the 1800’s in Maryland. Dana goes back in time to save Rufus, her ancestor, every time he is faced with life threatening situations. Throughout her journey in Maryland she gets life experience of what being a slave was like in the past. In the novel we learn of two slaves, Sarah and Alice, who live on the Weylin plantation. Sarah, an older slave, is the cook
would have not survived without the support of her community. Beloved is an important work of the period because it served as one of the first novels, written by a black woman, to not only provide a candid and collective tale of the black slave experience, but to also tackle issues of mental health in the black