The Main Themes in Novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Silence also played a role in one of her biggest moral dilemmas in this novel: assisting in the sexual exploitation of a black woman by a white man. In section 11 of the Fight, Rufus ordered Dana to talk to Alice into sleeping with him. Initially, Dana rejects his proposal. However, after Rufus mentioned that either way he would get her even if that meant he had to beat her, Dana decided to inform Alice about this. Additionally, doing anything that would prevent Rufus from sleeping with Alice would erase Dana’s existence. She began to understand that Alice’s fate was certain, it was just a matter of how greatly she will be hurt during the process. Though Dana chose the least horrifying option of Rufus not whipping Alice, it still meant that Rufus sexually abused Alice, clearly going against Dana’s feminist principles. This raises the question of whether or not Dana’s decision was justifiable? And whether Alice’s emotional damage caused by the rape was really better than the physical damage that would be otherwise caused by whipping? This is because, in the end, Alice ended up killing herself after staying silent through years of sexual abuse. Silence in these cases is symbolic of society’s silence in the face of injustice, yet it’s necessary for Dana’s survival, but ironically was what killed Alice.
This transformation of morals portrays how the environment can shape you. After spending months and years in the 1800s, Dana learned to protect herself through violence and silence, acting opposite to how she would in modern-day California.
What is Home?
Octavia Butler proved that home has various implications and does not necessarily have to follow the traditional role as a concrete place where one lives. Seeing Dana travel between the present and the past, the readers saw Dana caught between her home in the past and her home in the present each time she travels.Often, home is where an individual feels the safest and a place where they want to come back to. In the beginning, the readers assume that Dana’s home is in California, where she lives with Kevin. However, section 2 of the Fight began to challenge this traditional idea of home by portraying Dana’s shift in identity. In this section, Dana had just come back to the modern world from the Weylin Plantation, after being whipped by Mr.Weylin. The section began with simple sentences like “I awoke,” or “I listened.” Reading this felt very unnatural to me, implying that Dana herself felt disconnected, disoriented in the present. Butler’s use of figurative language, particularly personification, also helped portray Dana’s discomfort, comparing pain to a friend in the lines, “The pain was a friend. The pain had never been a friend to me before, but now it kept me still. It forced reality on me and kept me sane.” This could be interpreted as her wounded body became her only evidence that history and what had happened to her was real. Another way this line could be seen is that pain was the only feeling that could distract her mind away from the present and reality.
