The novel Kindred

The novel Kindred

The novel Kindred is an excellent literary piece written and created by Octavia Butler, a famous African-American fiction novelist, and writer of the current times. This superb novel contains the major problems and issues faced by the black-American community. It highlights the black slave’s pathetic condition as well as strongly condemns slavery and domestic violence imposed and inflicted upon the African-Americans in American society.

The linguistic elements in this novel are symbols, imagery, metaphors, motifs, and symbolism. Butler applies these language elements to relate different misconceptions and truths concerning the antebellum south to readers. Therefore, Butler enables the audience to comprehend the past by not by considering the novel’s characters as neither white nor black, only human.  Her observations are firmly centered on ways in which the past is painful to the minority groups.

Butler uses language to create a frontier in her fiction. Also, through her novel, Butler communicates various ways through which the environment shapes one’s thoughts and actions. One’s environment comprises of their surroundings, conditions, and language. Language is the most important of these three elements of the environment. Dana, the novel’s narrator, lives in a very different society than Rufus. Therefore, the ways in which these two characters view and use language is different. Language dictates how individuals think and determines if they can think critically. How individuals think is directly linked to how they perceive the world, besides one’s perception is their reality.

Even Kevin and Dana, who live in a similar period, perceives the world differently. They might live during a comparable time, but their perception of reality significantly differ due to who they are, a white man and a black woman. Butler centers her story on Rufus and Dana’s impact on each other. Rufus, in some instances, deviates from the society’s norms because his surrounding has been affected by Dana, who is also affected by her new environment. However, ultimately Rufus does not alter his prejudice, and Dana does not submit to complacency. Butler made these conclusions in her novel to enable the leader to recognize that even though these characters influence each other, they do not overpower the essential elements of their respective environments.

Butler overcomes the challenge of separating theory and practical in her novel in different ways. She ties and brings to the surface and ties all the themes together to draw the connection between fiction and reality. She brings to the surface and links together all themes of emotional and physical pain, fear, morality, social discrepancies as well as the definition of being human means. Besides, she demonstrates the communication gap existing between family members and spouses, which adds to the black American’s misery.

This demonstrates the inequalities and injustices of the whites against the blacks. In her novel, Butler indicates that people of color have accepted atrocities and slavery as their destiny. This is evident in Butler’s comments that were made through the words of her protagonist in the novel. In some way, it is true that most black people in the contemporary world still look under the submission and control of the whites. Therefore, Butler creates a neo-slave narrative genre globally. This makes the novel kindred an enjoyable literary experience about slavery, which reveals the realities of societal racism and a history of harmful policies.