The impact of Kindred

Kindred by Octavia Butler is a book that infuses the aspect of history with science fiction. Butler takes two important times in American history: the period of slavery and the year of 1976. Butler uses time travel in order to show how the past has shaped and continues to shape the present.

    I believe that Butler specifically chose the year 1976 because it is the year where the United States celebrated 200 years of freedom. I believe that Butler uses these two different setting in order to show how important the past is to understanding the present.
    There are further similarities with the characters. Butler creates a double of Dana with Alice. Rufus even goes as far as to think that they are the same person. Rudus uses Alice for his physical desires and Dana for emotional comfort. “He likes me in bed, and you out of bed...all that means we’re two halves of the same woman” (229).  By establishing a relationship between the past and present, Butler not only gets the perspective of a free, twentieth-century black women's challenges in the nineteenth-century slavery, but also also a view on the nineteenth-century black woman’s life in slavery.
    Dana seems to be naive as she doesn't know the severity and harsh reality of a black women in nineteenth-century slavery. As time passes and she meets Alice, Dana begins to realize just how much Alice has to suffer. As time passed Alice “adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little” (169). This viewpoint on nineteenth century slavery really hits the crucial aspects of just how terrible slavery was and shows just how we have moved on.