Out Of Survival In Kindred By Octavia Butler

In life, most often, people make their decisions based on what seems morally right, ethically right, or right by society’s standards. A person normally would not steal from another person because that goes against their morals. Sometimes though, people have to go against all their rational reasoning to survive. Octavia Butler shows this many times throughout her novel Kindred with the main character Dana Franklin. In the story, Dana is forced to travel back in time to the 1800s in the South. She soon realizes every time she is forced to go back in time it is to help one of her white ancestors, Rufus Weylin. During this, the reader sees the decisions Dana has to make to survive as a black woman in that time and place. In Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, she uses the decision making of Dana to portray that sometimes people must do things they normally wouldn’t in order to survive. The first time Dana is faced with a decision that her survival depends on is when she goes to Alice’s house for the first time. In this scene, Dana witnesses Alice’s mother get beaten by a group of white patrollers. Later that night, one of the patrollers comes back to get revenge, but he instead meets Dana. The patroller then tries to punish Dana for talking back to him and having no manners. Dana fights back only exacerbating the situation. At one point she decides that she has to win this fight in order to avoid being sold as a slave. While this is happening, Dana thinks to scratch out the man’s eyes and says, “But I couldn’t do it. The thought sickened me, froze my hands where they were. I had to do it! But I couldn’t…” (34-43) This shows that Dana knows to get out of this situation she has to hurt the patroller, yet she can’t make herself do it. But later on in this scene Dana is faced with being beaten to death and raped, so she forces herself to hit the patroller over the head with a stick. (43) Here the reader sees how Butler uses Dana’s actions to portray that when faced with life of death people will act differently than normal just to survive. Dana at first could not make herself hurt the patroller, when she was not in immediate danger of dying. The thought alone sickened her. When it was a life or death situation though, her mindset completely changed and she hurt the patroller to save herself. The second time Dana makes a decision she would never normally do is when Rufus hits her for the first time. In this part of the book another slave, Sam, talks to Dana and says it’s too bad she is already married to someone. Rufus hears him and is belligerent, so he decides to sell Sam to slave traders. Dana see’s what Rufus has done and starts to yell at him, saying he had no reason to sell Sam. Then Rufus hits Dana across the face, …show more content…
Leading up to when she stabbed him Rufus had told Dana that she was too much like Alice, that they were two halves of a whole. He kept on telling Dana that he was lonely, and that he missed Alice. Then he said that his children’s safety and her safety depended on her being with him. The thought disgusted Dana. She did not want to be what Alice was to Rufus. Dana says, “But it would be so hard to raise the knife, drive it into the flesh I had saved so many times. So hard to kill… ” (255-260) The author has Dana say this to show that she doesn’t want to hurt Rufus. It shows that she is conflicted on what she should do, let Rufus use her, or defend herself. But then Dana realizes that Rufus is unpredictable. He can’t be completely trusted, so she stabs him. (260) In this situation she didn’t know what to value more, Rufus someone she cares about, or how she would live with herself. She did not know if she valued her dignity or his life more. In the end she killed him so she could survive with herself as a person. This really shows how people will make unlikely decisions when faced with