In the novel Kindred, Octavia Butler recounts the experience of Dana Franklin as she travels through time and space from her home in 1976 to the ante bellum South in 1815 in Maryland, where she found herself on a plantation of which her ancestors were slaves. It is through the lens of time travel that allows Dana and the reader to witness the tragic and horrific period of slavery. It is this direct experience that drives the neo-slavery story of Dana and her ancestors to act and react in order to survive a complex system of slavery on the plantation. The most personal consequences of these events manifest in Dana and her experiences of physical abuse and emotional manipulation, all of which have a drastic effect on her that will change her forever. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Dana's first experience is sudden and heartbreaking, as she is ripped from her own home and time and deposited on the bank of a muddy river she has never seen before. After saving the young boy she later discovers is her ancestor and being threatened with a gun to the face, she is removed from the situation again and returns to her and her husband's house, confused and afraid. “I don’t have a name for what happened to me but it was real” (Butler 17). When Dana is transported for the second time, she begins to understand why this is happening and what it has to do with Rufus. “Dana's obligation to Rufus's life, which is also an obligation to her own, structures the interplay of story and morality that motivates Butler's plot. If Rufus dies, Dana will never be born. Or rather, she can't afford to find out what would happen to him if she didn't save him. By placing Dana in this dilemma, Butler is able to illustrate the deep and thorny tangle at the heart of Southern plantation slavery, thereby dismantling any cultural myth of encounters with extraterrestrials. Furthermore, by structuring the text around Dana's various obligations (her own, Rufus's, other slaves), Butler not only complicates the range of Dana's responses in any situation, but she also forces the reader to respect the same rules” (Parham 1318). Dana will not only have to make decisions she never thought she would have to make, but also take actions she never thought she would have to take and suffer the consequences not only for herself, but for others as well. . All this in the paradoxical effort to preserve the existence of his future family, even if it might mean to the detriment of his own: “If I had to live, if the others had to live, he had to live. I did not dare to test the paradox” (Butler 29). One of the most obvious methods Butler uses to illustrate this conscious approach to Dana is slavery and violence, specifically violence against slaves. During her visit to Rufus' nest, Dana witnesses the daily violence and treatment the slaves had to endure. endure when she witnesses the beating of a black man for no clear reason by patrol officers. Dana's response to watching something like this so up close and personal is eye-opening to say the least. “I had seen people beaten on television and in the cinema. But I had not lain near and smelled their sweat or heard their pleas and prayers, ashamed before their families and themselves” (Butler 36). Because Dana comes from the future and she is also experiencing it for the first time, the experience of.