Jared Kolaris

Doctor Jackie Dawson

Science Fiction Literature - F (F - US).

04/24/2024

Have you ever been curious about time travel? Have you ever wondered how two different timelines could co-exist? This theme is thoroughly explored through Octavia Butler's “Kindred”. As we can see, Dana's time travels to the antebellum South also serve as a channel for exploring themes of power, identity, and agency. While she and Kevin acknowledge their inability to change the past, the reader is invited to come alongside Dana on her treacherous journey to reveal the complexities and harsh realities of the past. But Kevin and Dana know they can’t change history. They say: “We’re in the middle of history. We surely can’t change it” (p. 100); and “It’s …show more content…
Why must the reader experience this journey with Dana? The reader must be invited through the journey along with not only Dana but also Kevin, it's important to see and understand what these lead roles in the novel had to go through, it teaches readers to sympathize and be in the moment as if they were in the book alongside Kevin and Dana through their harsh trek.

Dana's time travel to the antebellum south serves as a pathway to the theme of the cruel power dynamics that controlled her life. Dana regularly falls back and forth between the antebellum south and California. Readers must understand her shift to the antebellum south took place in the 1800s, but when she's in her timeline, it's 1976. As Dana experiences these time travels she begins to understand that she's being sent back in time for a reason, a purpose: Rufus Weylin, a white, young, racist boy, whose father owns the …show more content…
Throughout the entire book, Dana's identity is explored through finding her purpose. We have already discovered that Dana is continuously sent back in time to save her great great ancestor, Rufus Weylin. Along this journey Dana, time and time again, seems to save Rufus's life, further helping her figure out her identity/purpose. Even though she doesn't always know who she is, she stays strong, rolls with the punches, and continues her journey through the antebellum south. Threats to Dana's autonomy also played a huge factor in her travels. Not having any control over when she was to travel back in time, Dana saw it as a threat to her freedom, “I was afraid the dizziness might come back while I was in the shower, afraid that I would fall and crack my skull against the tile or that I would go back to the river, wherever it was, and find myself standing naked amongst strangers. Or would I appear somewhere else naked and vulnerable?”(Butler 18). Seeing this quote so early on in the novel shows Dana's agency has been threatened since the start. But it's not just the act of traveling back in time, her agency is also limited through the antebellum south, seeing that she is a black woman, on a plantation, in the 18th century. These harsh realities of Dana's time travel show the challenges and hardships