Kindred's Portrayl of Slavery

The way slavery is portrayed in Kindred is very similar to the ways slavery has been portrayed in novels going all the way back to the civil war itself. One of the primary arguments abolitionists made was that slavery was bad for everyone because it  made white slave owners amoral and caused great suffering to the slaves. While nowadays the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is remembered mostly for it's establishment of certain stereotypes, when it was published it was so controversial because it portrayed the way in which even largely benevolent white slave owners must do monstrous things to function in a slave owning society. While we would view much of that novel as naive, the fundamental argument that it makes and that was made by many abolitionists is still the primary way slavery is portrayed.
          The way in which rape is portrayed as an essential part of slavery is also a common aspect of abolitionists arguments. Uncle Tom's Cabin portrays slave owners sexually exploiting some of the young women they own. Interestingly the North often used this as an argument against slavery not only from moral grounds but also because it violated their own ideas of racial purity. I remember doing a research paper freshman year on Abraham Lincoln in which he argued that slavery should be abolished because the majority of what he called "mulattoes" came from the south. While he wasn't going to just come out and say that this was because slave owners tended to rape slaves, it is strongly implied.
       I don't mean this as an insult to the originality of Octavia Butler, in fact we could see it as proof that her portrayal of slavery was accurate, as other novelists writing at the time of slavery described it similarly. But it also meant that for me the aspect that was most interesting was the way in which slaves internalized the violence and became used to it. The children playing "auction" and Dana's own gradual adoption of the postures of slavery. While I'm sure this has been described before somewhere, most accounts I have seen focus on the explicit violence of whippings and the like rather then the everyday destruction of human dignity which Butler portrays so well.

The "Straight Man" in Kindred

Kindred is the novel which feels the least postmodern of all the novel's we've read this semester. It feels like much more of a conventional sci-fi novel, and while it raises questions similar to those raised by many other novels in this course it employs a technique that none of the others do. Kindred has what is often referred to as a "straight man", a term which in sci-fi refers to any character who, for any number of reasons is as much an outsider in the sci-fi setting as the reader and so gives both a convenient mechanism for exposition and allows the reader to relate to someone who is also an outsider in the setting. Neo from The Matrix is a classic straight man, he is unaware that the world he is living in is a fake and so it must be explained to both him and the audience how the matrix functions, and the audience relates to him because they live in a world identical to Neo's matrix.
            Dana and Kevin are both straight men in kindred, we can relate to them because they come from a similar time period and can explicitly discuss many of the things the reader is thinking about when the reader sees the 19th century south. None of the other novels we have read involve a straight man. Slaughter House Five also involves a time travel mechanic but while Dana tries to figure out what's happening in Kindred Billy Pilgrim just sort of is pulled along blindly . The World of Mumbo Jumbo but no one in the novel even bats an eye at the idea of culture war being carried out literally by secret societies.
         I think many of my classmates have found kindred to be their favorite book in the course because it uses a technique which seems much more familiar to them, and which exists to facilitate a more conventional linear plot than many of the other novels we have read.