Now that I'm done with Kindred and have had some time to look back on it, I'm a little surprised by what sticks out in my mind. To be honest, starting the book I wasn't entirely thrilled. The writing itself wasn't grabbing me the way Vonnegut does, and even if the plot was exciting I was a bit worried that it wouldn't go in depth into any of the bigger questions. And while it's true that it's not Butler's style to explicitly meditate too long on a single issue -- unless you count the book itself as one long meditation on historical memory, which would be fair -- the questions she poses are big and have a lot of really even-handed evidence.
All of the main characters in this book have a specific purpose, or even a specific surrogate in mind. They aren't just there to give the book a few sets of eyes to experience the killer plot. The way the characters think is really integral to the "point" of the novel in a way that's not all that common to see, and that I really wasn't expecting going into this. To get the obvious out of the way first, Dana is very clearly a surrogate for Octavia Butler, in that she's drawn into a very conscious exploration of her historical past, even if Butler probably had a bit more control over her decision to write Kindred than Dana had over going back in time. I already wrote a blog post on Kevin and how he serves as a surrogate for the "normal" reader -- that is, someone who isn't too invested in the history, and is more just along for the ride, even if it's an occasionally horrifying and deeply personally affecting ride. The big difference we get between the two is that while his time in the past affected him, there isn't too much indication that the entire way Kevin thinks changes too much as a result of what happens, whereas Dana really does see some huge changes to her sense of self and her ability to feel empathy for others, or at least for certain others.
Maybe the most interesting character for me in terms of what he's meant to represent is Rufus. Of all the characters in the book he's probably the most complex, and easily the one who develops most. Dana's time travel allows us to quickly skip to different stages in his life without seeing the actual growth in between -- we just have to guess at it from the drastically different ways he acts. This allows us to understand him both as the innocent child we see in Dana's second trip to the past, and as the rapacious (yet somewhat sympathetic) slaveholder we see in her last. The abridged story of his personal development helps to humanize him, and to make us understand what he actually feels towards Alice and Dana. If Dana's first trip had been to a fully-formed Rufus already involved in his twisted "relationship" with Alice, our picture of him would have been remarkably different; there would have been much less incentive for us to look for a positive side to his character. This is a very important point that Butler makes: as much as we like to think of slaveholders as simply brutal monsters, the truth is that they were people like anyone else, coerced into play a role almost as much as the slaves themselves simply by virtue of their birth. That doesn't excuse their actions -- far from it -- but rather drives home the point that people today are not as far from our past as we would like to believe; there is nothing in our nature that stops us from becoming as abusive as Rufus. It all comes down to context.
We do have to be careful expressing our sympathy for Rufus, because it can sound dangerously close to an apology for slavery ("it was so hard for these poor white people!"). But one thing that I always take away from this novel is what a horrible system this would have been to live under for everyone involved--and this is NOT to say that the amount or scale of suffering is "equivalent," or to downplay the complete and utter exploitation that the whole thing is based upon. There's a lot of talk about "dehumanization" as a part of slavery, but Butler takes this idea in the rather novel direction of showing, through Rufus, how living as a slave-owner is itself dehumanizing. The power that his society has given Rufus *does* corrupt him: he lacks the restraint or emotional maturity to accept Alice's rejection of his overtures in large part because he knows he can get away with discounting her will altogether and forcing himself on her, with the complete sanction and even approval of his society for doing so. Slavery was obviously a profound affront to the humanity of the enslaved, but it also did profound damage to the people who held those slaves. Accordingly, it's a history that's painful for both white and black Americans to contemplate, for different but related reasons.
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