Fictional Humans

Kindred’s a book you don’t have to put down. It reads like a movie; it holds your attention. Octavia Butler does a splendid job of teaching readers about the past through an excitement-packed story. However there were times when the characters felt unreal. At times I could not believe a person would respond to a situation in the way the characters did. There is an inevitable shortcoming to all stories that exist outside of an author’s realm of experience.

I know this book was focused on the historical aspects—what happened to people, the terrible treatment and corrupting influence of an environment. The story was meant to expose the intricacies of the tragedy that is often glazed over in history books—it forces us to acknowledge the first hand injustice of splitting up families and dehumanizing people, raising children with no hope of their own future. The book’s probably not about what an environment like that can do to a person. However, I wish it was. I had high hopes for when Kevin got trapped in the past for five years. Surely five years would affect a person, make them crumble eventually and assimilate. Not Kevin, though…five years and he did exactly what all of us think we would do in his situation, a white man from the future that’s been taught equality. He helped free slaves and kept a steady spirit and held on to faith that Dana would come get him. After five years the biggest marks on him were a little writer’s block and a temporary fear of driving. How many people in the world actually have the strength and resolve to maintain their identity in that kind of situation? I don’t know, maybe a lot, but not me. I tried to imagine myself in Kevin’s shoes. He must have gone through crippling loneliness. Five years, and no record of him making meaningful connections. How could he? He was on guard to leave at any moment. He was tempted to buy a farm at some point, but amazingly he still had hope. He didn’t even know if Dana would come back, or how long she would be gone. He was trapped in a foreign world without the skills to survive in it, and yet he did. I think I would have lost hope. How can a person stand to be that lonely? Dana and Kevin are both unbelievably adaptable.

The most believable character of the story was Rufus. His childhood was tragically dysfunctional—a dad who gave him none of the affection a kid needs, and a submissive mom who gave him everything he wanted, which is arguably a worse abuse. As a result, he turned into exactly what we’d expect from the way he was raised--unable to hack acceptable relationships, never learning to give, and as a result becoming more frustratingly lonely each day. Out of desperateness, he tries to force people to stay with him. All that does is push them away, and in the end, it’s what kills him. In the final few scenes, Dana describes Rufus “sorry and lonely and wanting me to take the place of the dead” (259). He acts from his feelings and his experience, just like a person would be expected to do. I got the sense that Butler related to Rufus in some ways, and that made him more real than Dana and Kevin ever seemed.

It’s impossible to get people right in stories like these because their experiences are beyond our understanding. I wish we could have gotten in Dana’s and Kevin’s minds, seen their hopelessness and helplessness described, and felt with them, but there’s no way of knowing how they would have felt. That’s the wistful disappointment of anything other than autobiography, I guess.