Honors Program
Honors in English
Date of Award
5-2014
Thesis Professor(s)
Michael Cody
Thesis Professor Department
Literature and Language
Thesis Reader(s)
Karen Kornweibel, Leslie McCallister
Abstract
Slavery is something that cannot be taken lightly. Even Butler says no matter how harsh the slavery in her novel is, it does not compare to how gruesome actual slavery was: “As a matter of fact, one of the things I realized when I was reading the slave narrative…was that I was not going to be able to come anywhere near presenting slavery as it was. I was going to have to do a some-what cleaned-up version of slavery, or no one would be willing to read it” (qtd. in Kenan 497). Octavia Butler knew that if she presented slavery directly and in a way that called people, most likely white males, that there would not be an audience for the novel. Instead she had to present slavery as something society shaped, rather than a specific group of individuals. An analysis of Octavia Butler’s Kindred reveals that societal expectations alter the dynamics of such interracial relationships as those between Dana and Kevin, Dana and Rufus, and Rufus and Alice, determining their success or failure without regard to the foundations upon which these relationships were initially built.
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
LaFaver, Zakary H., "Back to the Future: Taking a Trip Back in Order to Move Forward in Octavia Butler’s Kindred" (2014). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 215. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/215
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.