...Life is a valuable thing and most people will go through many terrible struggles in order to continue living. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, a girl named Dana is send back in time every now and then to rescue her ancestor, who is the son of a big slave owner, from getting himself killed. Dana’s decisions affect her throughout the story. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uses the conflicts Dana must face to survive to reveal that her meaning of survival is doing whatever it take to survive. Dana treats Rufus differently when she realizes that he is the reason that she was born. In Dana’s second trip she stopped Rufus from burning down the house and learns a little about him and the situation she is in. Dana thinks to herself why she was sent to save him and thinks up that he has to grow up and father Hager. “No matter what I did, he would have to survive to father Hagar, or I could not exist.”shows her first survival related encounter and “If I was to live, if others were to live, he must live. I didn’t dare test the paradox.”(29) is the second one. This is another sign of being desperate to know and sign of change she undergoes in the story to survive....
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...In life, people always have decisions to make, and behind those choices, there are motivations whether it be for survival, acceptance, love, or for revenge. This is demonstrated through the novel, Kindred by Octavia Butler when one of the main characters, Dana, travels back in time to meet her ancestor, Rufus Weylin, who calls for her when he is in danger. Everytime she goes back to Rufus's time, she has to make decisions that are essential to her survival. In Kindred, Octavia Butler uses the decisions each character makes to suggest the idea that his/her fate and the fate of those around them are affected by their choices. During Dana’s fourth trip, in a conversation between Dana and Alice, Butler suggests the idea that Liza, the sewing...
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...environment because of how we lack survival instincts. Like Albert Einstein said, “Man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a social animal.” Throughout Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reader sees the main character Dana get herself into dangerous interactions due to her initial ignorance that she is time traveling back to the slavery era, where she works for a slave owner during her time in the antebellum South. Some of those moments are when Dana fights a slave owner to protect a freed slave who is married to a slave who escaped, another would be when Dana gets whipped for holding a spelling test that a younger slave took, also when Dana tries to pass for a slave owned by her...
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...Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, describes the impossible life of Dana Franklin. Dana and her husband, Kevin, go through a series of events that include time travelling and ensuring her birth by helping her ancestors, Rufus Weylin and Alice Greenwood. Throughout the novel, the reader is introduced to slavery through a progressive black female’s perspective. Dana is forced into slavery again and again, ultimately and unfortunately learning the ways of the South in the pre-Civil War era. She acts the part of slave for the sake of survival and adjusts quickly while trying to alter the thinking of Rufus with little success. Although slaves had similar jobs and enslaved women worked mostly in the domestic sphere, black women tolerated harsher labor...
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