Kindred is very different from a book such as ragtime or slaughterhouse five in one large sense that I think made it the most "fictional" book we will read all semester. Which to me is the serious nature with which time travel is implemented in Dana and Kevin's life.
It's not that there's something I simply can't believe does exist in our reality such as as slaughter-house five and tralfalmadore. Tralfalmadore is a concept in the end that doesn't matter if its real to anyone but Billy. Whereas in Kindred time-travel is experienced and understood by multiple people.
Now I want to say this helps the novel, bu in the end its simply adding more distance between us and antebellum America. Which to me is the exact opposite of what Octavia Butler is setting out to achieve by breaking free from the traditional slave narrative, and using time travel. Dana is us, our values in a harsher time it shows us just how disconnected we are. yet while it does this it continues to push us further away showing that you would need something as supernatural as the time travel to even get a small glimpse of the Weylins plantation functioning as it once was, which in a larger sense is an "inside view" of the system that slavery created. The time machine just serves to distance us further.
But to me this isn't a particularly large failure, if you talk long enough you can construe it in such a way that it helps convey the books idea of distance, the idea that the only way we could get the best picture of early america is time travel. I may be reading the priority of butler's themes wrong, she may me value this idea of distance over portraying her story as one of the most realistic takes you'll ever get on slavery.
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