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Brief Summary Of Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

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The novel Kindred, written by the author Octavia E. Butler, was about a black woman named Dana Franklin traveling through time to save her ancestors to ensure her birth. Dana travels back to the 1800s, to the era known as the “Antebellum South.” The novel opens with a horrific scene of Dana having her arm crushed in the wall of her house and being taken to the hospital. The police question her about what happened, as they accuse her husband Kevin. Eventually Kevin is cleared as a suspect and is allowed to see his wife Dana. The Prologue ends there, and we are presented with how this incident took place. The novel’s setting is centered around Dana’s house or where she is teleported which is Rufus father’s plantation. Dana and Rufus have a complicated …show more content…

Most of Rufus’s anger is toward his father. One time he even summons Dana because he decided to set the house on fire because his father beat him. Also, Rufus once pointed his gun at her and threatened to kill her, lied to her, yelled at her and punished her for doing nothing wrong. Dana is tired of the mistreatment, so she sticks to their roles with the knowledge that he's unpredictable. Even the other slaves have mixed feeling towards him “they seem to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time” (pg 159). Dana feels the same way. Their relationship started to change when he started seeing Dana differently. Dana had a resemblance to another slave named Alice. This led to Rufus making the remark of them being “two halves of a whole” (pg 247). Towards the end of the novel Alice commits suicide, leaving Rufus devastated. He even goes as far as to try to commit suicide himself, but Dana stopped him. Rufus tries to take his relationship with Dana to the next level by almost raping her. Dana says that “I could except him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover” ( pg 260), so Rufus’s intentions were going to immediately rejected by Dana. Dana isn't comfortable nor accepting of Rufus's implications. Dana’s motivation changes when Rufus changes. As he got older he tended to act on emotions. For example, Rufus wants her to stay and hurts people without thinking first. Their relationship is officially and finally severed when Dana kills him. This needed to be done because Rufus wanted something Dana was never going to give him, which was being physically involved with

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