Dana's Obstacles In The Book Kindred

In the book titled Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,an American Slave,the author Frederick Douglass shows how courage is a defining human element.Douglass continuously exhibits this throughout the book by doing many things that could get him in trouble. The author’s purpose is to show that courage is a defining element of the human spirit.

Rufus Weylin; a character first perceived as a young, curious and innocent boy, turns in to an over-obsessive and miserable tyrant. In Octavia Butler 's novel _Kindred_, the book revolves around the horrors of slavery in the United States in the early eighteen hundreds. White characters are given absolute power and control over black characters, and treat them like animals, making them live a long life of misery and unhappiness. As _Kindred_ unfolds, it becomes clear that Rufus turns in to a stereotypical slave owner and abuser. With every trip that Dana makes back to Rufus, there is a clear distinction of changes in his personality. He becomes more evil, over-obsessive and cruel as he gets older. In fact, he becomes very much like his

Neer the very beginning of the novel Dana is experiencing her second return to the past and is greeting her relatives when the father of Alice, her great great… grandmother, is being dragged away because he is presumed to be a runaway slave of the slave master, Tom Weylin. After that mess with Alice’s father clears, the patroller questions Dana as to who she is. When she can’t answer, the patroller drags her out of the home, and she tries to escape with no success. “The man tackled me and brought me down hard. At first, I lay stunned, unable to move or defend myself even when he began hitting me, punching me with his fists. I had never been beaten that way before - would never have thought that I could absorb so much punishment without losing consciousness.” After she is brutally beaten for a while, she scrambles and musters up the strength to bring a limb down onto the man’s head and runs fast and far away from the unconscious man who almost killed her. Although Dana’s tenacity might have come as a surprise to the readers, Butler also does a fabulous job of revealing how Dana is even surprised by her capability and how she can survive through her power as well as her

Dana meets Alice and her mom. Dana leaves their house and gets caught by a patroller who thinks Dana is Alice’s mother’s runaway sister. The patroller tries to rape Dana when she hits him with a stick and she is sent back to her time. Dana is back with Kevin, but she is unable to tell her story because she is fatigued. Dana wakes up and tells Kevin her story about what happened this time when she left.

The understanding of the life of a slave woman is far beyond the knowledge of you or I, unless you have actually been an enslaved woman. These literary elements depicting the passage from this story are the only

As a child, Frederick douglass was unable to form an emotional bond with his mother due to the limitations set by slavery, and was both mentally and physically tortured. By the time he had turned into a teenager he had managed to learn how to read and write, and had been under the service of multiple masters & overseers, most of which had been cruel and unforgiving. Yet, there was an urge in Frederick Douglass’s life that had caused him to fight back, and so he did, and not

The Narrative of Frederick Douglass and Night are two books about survival and overcoming the tribulations one might face. Both Eliezer and Douglass are put in situations which are out of their control, and the motivation they had to escape was the human spirit. This quality people have encourages us to endure and achieve just for the sake of living. This becomes relevant in both pieces because their stories are not so far apart. They both wrote their stories to prove a point about history and the best way to do so is to share their experiences of survival. However, they are quite different because the stories shape their lives opposite ways, one positive and one negative.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” This famous quote is from a speech given by one of America’s most influential abolitionist speakers, Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery, this great American leader led a life many of us would find impossible to bear. After gaining his freedom from slavery, Douglass shared his stories through impressive speeches and vivid autobiographies, which helped America move forward as a country liberated from racial inequality. Although Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave allows readers to understand what life was like for slaves in antebellum America, the most important and relevant lesson to take away from this narrative today is the importance of perseverance. Douglass’s courage to resist and learn paired with his determination to keep his faith and ultimately find himself, is something to which people from every culture and time period can relate.

Many people are not aware about the struggles slaves faced back in the day. In the 1800s slaves only knew a couple things like don’t talk back to your master, don’t run away, and don’t disobey your master. Many older slaves did know better, they kept to themselves, and they did their work. Watching beatings go on was a normal thing to some slaves. What happens when a child is not born into slavery, suddenly becomes a slave? Octavia Butler explores this question by using Dana in the novel, Kindred. Dana isn’t born into slavery, but she is sent back in time to the Antebellum South back in the 1800s where slavery was still a thing. Dana is sent back in time to many points of one of her relatives life, Rufus Weylin. Dana sees Rufus at an older age each time she is sent back to him, but each time he is in some trouble. In the novel Kindred, by Octavia Butler, Dana’s many scary explorations in the South the idea portray the idea that risky and scary decisions often must be made in order to survive.

Unknown to the main character and readers at the beginning of the novel, Dana is only transported back in time to save Rufus’s life. Exclusively transported back in time when Rufus is in danger, Dana has two choices available to her: save Rufus or let him die. However, since he is her ancestor, if she were to not save him, she would never be born. Every time Dana chooses to safe this brutally vicious man, she has feelings of conflict. She knows she could stop the emotional and physical pain being inflicted on herself and other slaves but at the same time she knows killing him will result in the killing of her modern day self.

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers. When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.(Jacobs.ch.9)

Frederick Douglass, in his personal memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, recounts his own personal experiences as a slave, and the road he took to become a free man. Douglass’s negative views on slavery permeate the Narrative from beginning to end. The underlying assumption that selfishness and intentional dishonesty are at the root of the slave ownership becomes clear in the excerpt from Chapter 7, “How I Learned to Read and Write.” Humans are inherently selfish creatures who find pleasure and significance in gaining an advantage over their fellow man in any regard, including education. Douglass discovers this fact as he pursues academic success.

Today's children learn and are influenced by their surrounding and environment. Children do not know any better; for them, it’s monkey see, monkey do. Today’s youth are taught to respect everyone of every race. However, back in the time of slaves, children were taught to despise blacks, and that's what most of them did. In the book Kindred, Dana Franklin journeys back and forth to the Antebellum South multiple times to see her past family who are slaves and the owner Rufus Weylin. On multiple occasions, Dana voyages back to the past to help Rufus when he is in danger, so her life does not become corrupt. Each time she goes back, different levels of danger await her. As Dana travels home and back to the past, she witnesses Rufus grow from

Octavia E. Butler uses her novel Kindred, to communicate how influential one’s environment can be in shaping their thoughts and actions. One’s environment is composed of their conditions and surroundings, and the most significant of these is language. The society in which Dana lives differs greatly from Rufus’s society; therefore, the way these characters use and view language differ. Language dictates the way one thinks, and whether or not they think critically. How one thinks is directly related to how one perceives the world and one’s perception is their reality. Even Dana and Kevin, who live in the same time period, perceive the world differently. They may live in the same time period, but their realities differ because of who they are, a black woman and a white man. Butler makes Dana and Rufus’s impact on one another central to story. Rufus sometimes deviates from the societal norms of his time because his environment has been influenced by Dana, who is also affected by her new surroundings. She begins to lose the ability to stand up for herself. Ultimately, however, Rufus does not change his prejudice, bigotry way of thinking, and Dana does not allow herself to succumb to complacency. Butler consciously made these decisions; she wants readers to recognize that while these characters influence one another, they do not do so enough to overpower the more significant aspects of their respective environments, such as language. One’s environment determines how much

Most slaves knew that education got slaves killed. Yet it never occurs to Dana that her speech, her education, her whole aura was unlike any other slave encountered before and therefore she was a potential threat to the slaveholder?s way of life.