Kindred (1979) was the book that put her on the literary map, though, as more in the genre of speculative fiction than sci-fi, it stood apart from her other works. Faced with her own powerlessness over Rufus, she retrieves the knife she has brought from home and slits her wrists in an effort to time travel. He had understood that once. ""Does that bother you?""No! ""West," I said bitterly. You'll probably never know. } catch (err) { Osborne-Bartucca, Kristen. Although Dana does not answer the question she poses here Dana and Kevin live in 1976, arguably a progressive time period. octavia e . The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow. Carrie clasped her hands around her neck again. "Blood, Genes and Gender in Octavia Butler's, Knabe, Susan and Wendy Gay Pearson. A place like this would endanger him in a way I didn't want to talk to him about. Kindred is a novel by Octavia Butler. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Kevin comes to retrieve Dana, but Rufus stops them on the road and threatens to shoot them. He had been doing that a lot lately. [24] The lesson of Dana's trips to the past, then, is that "we cannot escape or repress our racist history but instead must confront it and thereby reduce its power to pull us back, unthinkingly, to earlier modes of consciousness and interaction. ""I know," I said. The ease . And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. We're sorry, SparkNotes Plus isn't available in your country. I couldnt let her return to what she was, I couldnt let her come back whole and [losing her arm], I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. He was more hurt than mad.. A woman who works in a factory hates her job and is struggling with alcoholism. But then, it was part of the overseers job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean., Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. var e = document.createElement("script"); e.src = "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41mrkPcyPwL.js"; document.head.appendChild(e); Because "Prologue" occurs after Dana travels in time and "Epilogue" concludes with a message on the necessity to confront the past, we experience the story as Dana's understanding of what we have yet to understand ourselves, while the "Epilogue" speaks about the importance of this understanding. //