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Character Development In The Novel Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

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Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred tells the tale of American slavery from a more modern-day perspective through time travel. The novel includes many themes and recurring motifs, but it also includes many different characters with different motivations and personalities that all go through some sort of character development. No one character follows a certain archetype commonly found in a lot of other literary works, and it makes the story engaging and more realistic. First off is Dana, the main character of the story. At the novel's start, Dana has experience with doing hard labor to barely make a living, but her development starts after she travels back to the Weylin plantation. More specifically on her second trip “The Fire” when Dana heads …show more content…

Rufus starts as a boy who wishes revenge against his father who beats him, however, he is not as racist as Weylin, even being friends with many other slave children, which continues as he grows older. The first time we get to see the true Rufus is after he rapes Alice for the first time, leading her husband Isaac to attempt to kill Rufus. This shows that no matter how much he cares about Alice, he still sees her as a slave that must do what he wants. This continues after Alice is captured and bought by Rufus, and Rufus continues to force her into sexual acts against her will. Rufus also begins to use both Alice and Dana as an outlet for his anger, beating Alice when Dana leaves and sending Dana to work in the fields after his father dies. Despite this, Rufus does still have some redeemable traits in his later life, agreeing to free some of the slave children after Dana’s urging. However, Rufus still continues to see black people as inferior, trying to scare Alice into loving him by pretending to sell their children, and later trying to force himself onto Dana for the first time in the whole story, showing that while Rufus is not as cruel as his father, he cannot be molded by Dana into a person that sees all people as

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