Time and Travel in The Dispossessed and Kindred Term Paper

Time and Travel in The Dispossessed and Kindred - Term Paper Example Butler would agree with Asimov; when asked to label her novel, she has called it â€Å"a grim fantasy.† How time travel occurs in Kindred is never explained; the novel’s protagonist Dana simply feels dizzy from time to time and travels back in time, to pre-Civil War America. It is a mystery to her and to her husband, but they try to deal with the situation they have found themselves in, anyway. The only way she is able to return back to her own time is to feel threatened and in danger of dying. She even tries slitting her wrists in order to return to her own time. Each time she travels back in time, her stay on the plantation becomes longer—at first only a few minutes, and then several days and months. She disappears from the present as she travels, but at first for a few seconds and then for several hours. It seems as if Dana time travels to the past every time Rufus is in some kind of mortal danger. The first time she travels, he is drowning; the second time, s he saves him from dying in a fire. She discovers that the reason he â€Å"calls† her to the plantation is that he is her ancestor and it is her duty to save him so that she is preserved in the future. At the end of the book, however, she ends up killing him and experiences horrible consequences as a result—the mangling of her arm when she returns to the present. Perhaps the real reason she has to time travel is because it is Rufus’ destiny to die, and there is nothing she can do to prevent it. Although Butler was already established as a successful science fiction writer, one of the few African Americans in a white male-dominated field, the time travel in Kindred, is incidental. It is simply something she uses to illustrate her thesis about the horrors of slavery. When the novel is shelved in libraries or bookstores, even though Butler is well known as a writer of science fiction, it tends to be placed with African American literature because that creates the sa me feelings as the works of other female African American writers. Like all science fiction, though, Kindred is speculative: What would happen if a modern person got the opportunity to experience slavery first-hand? Time travel is used as a literary device to pursue her thesis, and to investigate how a sympathetic modern character would react in the setting of slavery. An example is Dana’s reaction to seeing a slave being whipped: I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge to vomit. I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t laid nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves (Butler 36). Even though it definitely science fiction/fantasy, Kindred has the feel and structure of a slave narrative. Dana, and Butler’s audience along with her, travels to the pas t so that they can experience it and understand the impact of history, and more specifically, of slavery. Dana travels from freedom to enslavement, like her ancestors did when they were taken from Africa and enslaved in America, never to return. She goes through the same horror as her slave ancestors, and the time travel she experiences is just as confusing as the voyage they experienced. Dana attempts to explain this to her white husband, after reacting to him with fear after she returns: â€Å"