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 …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