As the book entails more of African-American history rather than just a pure literature of science fiction since it deals slavery in the nineteenth century Antebellum South which unleashes the issue of slavery, its causes, effects and its evidences on a more modernized method and language to capture the interest of the reader particularly to the young adults whom the book has marketed, readers would see it as a reliable historical reference.
Every detail written on it illustrates manifestation of the tragic truth on how white people consider their supremacy over the blacks. This include horrible dilemma such as beatings, rape, forced labor, murderous acts, and any form of abuses whether physical, psychological or emotional which the protagonist Dana has experienced as a result of her permission to be transported in the past several times in search of a missing piece, though the epiphany was only after the first and second glimpses from the past via time travel on which the revelation involving her antecedent has occurred.
To dare oneself to involve in the not-so-good incidents and allow himself being hurt by anyone or anything could be a brave action if not heroic. However, Dana here is just a victim of unexplainable intervention which urges her to accept her ethnicity. Knowing that both the blood of the slave-owner rapist Rufus and the slave Alice runs through her blood, and with marriage with Kevin, another white man like his grandfather Rufus, Dana courageously surpass it in the end.
Readers of Kindred might see little of himself in Dana's terrible experiences and would help him realize the message that everyone is related with one another irregardless of color differences and norms. Time heals all wounds but never the lesson it imparted and the history out of it, with or without science intervention.
R E F E R E N C E
Butler, Octavia. Kindred. New York: Doubleday, 1979.
