Narrative Elements In Octavia Butler's Bloodchild

It always amazes me that books from such exceptional writers, who come from distinct backgrounds, and write different works, for diverse audiences can have so many connecting ideas, and techniques of displaying similar narrative elements. Octavia Butler and Kazuo Ishiguro, for example, wrote their own dystopian stories about humans and another form of life in order to show what certain advancements can do if they are taken to an extreme. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel tells the tale of a world where clone farms exist in order to supply the human race a resource from which organs can be acquired for those in need, like cancer patients, ultimately making cancer curable. In Octavia Butler’s short story, “Bloodchild”, a group of humans is fleeing the planet

But we didn’t really know what that meant.” (Ishiguro 69)

The ‘students’ of Hailsham lived very sheltered lives and that could have had a lot to do with it. They were told what was to happen once they became donors, but they did not truly know what that demanded of them. One of the short stories in Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and other stories was “Bloodchild”. In this short story a boy named Gan lived his life on a planet with creatures called the Tlic. These beings accepted the Terran, Gan’s people, on their planet. In turn, however, Terran were required to become hosts for the Tlic’s children. Gan says, “I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together- a kind of birth” (Butler 16). For Gan this was an outcome that he could have avoided by giving the role to his sister, Hoa. Gan does contemplate the idea,

“I shook my head. ‘Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.’ I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine? ‘Don’t do it to Hoa,’ I repeated.” (Butler