Narrators in The Time Machine and Kindred
Both The Time Machine by H. G Wells and Kindred by Octavia Butler, deal with the concept of time travel. The authors explain this concept in different ways by using narrators to tell the story. While the narrators have aspects in common, the differences lead to different feelings on time travel. The largest similarity in Kindred and The Time Machine is the use of a first-person narrator. In Kindred, the narrator is Dana, a twenty-six-year-old black woman living in California in the 1970s. The reader can tell that Dana is the narrator because of the use of the first person pronouns:
“‘Dana.’ He spoke softly. The sound of his voice seemed to put distance between me and the memory. But still…
‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ I said” (Butler 15).
The story is told from Dana’s perspective similar to how The Time Machine is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator. Not much is known about the narrator in The Time Machine; all the reader knows is that he was a dinner guest of the Time Traveler. “The next Thursday I went again to …show more content…
On one of the first pages in Kindred Dana narrates: “The trouble began long before June 9, 1976, when I became aware of it, but June 9 is the day I remember” (Butler 12). From this quote, we can assume that Dana has already experienced these events and is recalling them at some point later in life. This is also the case with The Time Machine’s narrator. At the end of the novel, the narrator tells us: “The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned” (Wells 98). This implies that the story happened at least three years before the narrator is telling the story. Telling a narrative after the fact helps the narrator emphasize the important parts of the story and better understand what happened to them. There are also discrepancies between Dana and the narrator in The Time
Both The Time Machine by H. G Wells and Kindred by Octavia Butler, deal with the concept of time travel. The authors explain this concept in different ways by using narrators to tell the story. While the narrators have aspects in common, the differences lead to different feelings on time travel. The largest similarity in Kindred and The Time Machine is the use of a first-person narrator. In Kindred, the narrator is Dana, a twenty-six-year-old black woman living in California in the 1970s. The reader can tell that Dana is the narrator because of the use of the first person pronouns:
“‘Dana.’ He spoke softly. The sound of his voice seemed to put distance between me and the memory. But still…
‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ I said” (Butler 15).
The story is told from Dana’s perspective similar to how The Time Machine is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator. Not much is known about the narrator in The Time Machine; all the reader knows is that he was a dinner guest of the Time Traveler. “The next Thursday I went again to …show more content…
On one of the first pages in Kindred Dana narrates: “The trouble began long before June 9, 1976, when I became aware of it, but June 9 is the day I remember” (Butler 12). From this quote, we can assume that Dana has already experienced these events and is recalling them at some point later in life. This is also the case with The Time Machine’s narrator. At the end of the novel, the narrator tells us: “The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned” (Wells 98). This implies that the story happened at least three years before the narrator is telling the story. Telling a narrative after the fact helps the narrator emphasize the important parts of the story and better understand what happened to them. There are also discrepancies between Dana and the narrator in The Time