Dana wades in after him, drags him to shore, and tries to revive him. When she comes to her senses, she is at the edge of a wood, near a river where a small, red-haired boy is drowning. While unpacking, Dana suddenly became dizzy. The day before, Dana and Kevin had moved into a house a few miles away from their old apartment in Los Angeles. Their lives were altered on June 9, 1976, the day of Dana's twenty-sixth birthday, in the year the United States was celebrating its bicentennial.

When Kevin visits her, they acknowledge being afraid to tell the truth because no one would believe them. Dana tells them that she lost her arm because of an accident and that Kevin is not to blame. Police deputies question her about the circumstances and ask her whether her husband Kevin, a white man, beats her. Prologue ĭana, a young black woman, wakes up in the hospital with her arm amputated. Kindred scholars have noted that the novel's chapter headings suggest something 'elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative,' thus giving the impression that the main characters are participating in matters greater than their personal lives. Butler has categorized the work as 'a kind of grim fantasy.' Plot While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, Kindred crosses genre boundaries and is also classified as African-American literature. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism. Kindred explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century Black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Dana makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time. As Dana stays for longer periods in the past, she becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community.

There she meets some of her ancestors: a proud, free Black woman and a white planter who forces her into slavery and concubinage. The book is the first-person account of a young African-American writer, Dana, who is repeatedly transported in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 with her white husband and an early 19th-century Maryland plantation on the Eastern Shore. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E.

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