Octavia Butler uses Kindred to show a modern women can survive in the past, where slavery and cruel punishment was the norm to the society. In this novel, Kindred uses time travel as a crucial element to mysteriously travel Dana thru time to take her back to 1815. Throughout the novel, Dana is taken back to the past where she is meant to save the lives of her ancestors in order for her family tree to survive. Kindred uses many details to distinguish between the past, present, and past present.. Throughout the novel, Butler uses time travel as an essential role to bring Dana to endure the hardships that was once present in the past for African Americans. As Kindred takes Dana back to the past, through her first two time travels, the scene is immediately set in 1815, as it is described so vividly. The society that Dana is sent back to, as she notices is back to a time of slavery and…show more content… A coffle- slaves for sale” (Kindred, 246). This was the another time throughout the novel that Dana came to see such a horrific treatment of human beings, yet being in the past, the aftereffects of the memory of such punishment should remain with her when she travels back to the present.
Throughout the novel, Dana is teleported to the past six different times, experiencing different times throughout the past to save Rufus’s life as Kindred describes. After being taken back to 1815 the first time, I believe that Dana realized that her true identity wouldn’t make sense and in order to save her family line she must not reveal certain information in the past, all while keeping a fake personality of the past, rather than keeping her true identity. As Weylin had suddenly asked Dana about herself, she was ready,
“How old are
