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Slavery In Octavia Butler's Kindred

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“I closed my eyes again remembering the way I had been hurt—remembering the pain.” (Butler 20) Dana, the main character in Octavia Butler’s Kindred stated this quote to emphasize the great amount of pain she has experienced in her life, and how focusing and remembering the pain keeps her from losing her grip on reality. Dana, takes the reader in a journey back to the slave period through the antebellum south and allows the reader to travel time through the eyes of a modern African-American woman and experience all the heartache and misery she experienced during those times. Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Kindred explores not only the unimaginable horrors of slavery; but how those horrors and the time travel affects everyone. Dana, the main character of this novel …show more content…

Dana visits Rufus in moments where she needs to save his life, and returns to the 20th century when she senses her life is in danger. Throughout Dana’s journey of time travel she encounters several moments where she deeply considers saving Rufus’ life or simply letting him die. Examples would be when he sends Dana to the cornfields and whips her, when he sells Joe and Hagar, Alice’s children to a slave trader, and lastly when he attempts to rape Dana. Dana is cautious with Rufus’s life because he is one of her ancestors and if he dies she would cease to exist, however after he attempts to rape her she’s had enough and she stabs him to death. “Dana lives in that time to help herself live in her own time. She adjusts to the peculiar situation with an unsteady determination, even through the worst that slavery had to offer to human beings.” (Kevin Weston) Even though Dana suffered greatly, she was able to better understand what her ancestors went through and it surely made her a

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