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Essay / The concept of home in Kindred
Octavia E. Butler's home is often seen as one of the places where a person feels safest and one of the places where one loves no longer be. This sounds very simple, but in her novel Kindred, Octavia E. Butler complicates this concept of home by using the conflicting emotions of the characters Dana and Kevin to show how having more pointed experiences somewhere affects their idea of what it is. 'is and where the house is. Both Dana and Kevin are taken from one time to the next and in Dana's case, more than once, causing them to rethink their ideas about what they are and where home is. During their stays in the 19th century, they have many experiences that make them feel more connected and begin to feel like home. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Near the beginning of the story, Dana is sure that the new apartment she shares with Kevin in 1976 is her home. After her second visit to Rufus, she said again: “My God, I hurt and I am so tired. But that doesn't matter. I'm at home ". She hasn't been in the 19th century very long and has only had a few experiences there, most of them not very good. She also didn't really have any connections to the people there, other than realizing that some of them were her ancestors. She therefore naturally considers her 1976 apartment to be her home. It's the era she grew up in, and it's home to Kevin and the things she loves/knows most, while 19th century Maryland is a time and place she's lived in since less than a day. As Dana begins to make more and more trips back to the antebellum South, she has more experiences there and makes more connections with the people there. She's getting more used to everything that's going on there and how it works. When she looks back on it after a few more visits and after picking up Kevin, she thinks that Rufus' time was a "sharper, stronger reality", and that "the work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger , the danger was greater.” the pain was worse.” Dana has done and experienced so much there that it has become a place she knows well enough to call home. She recalls that “she remembered feeling relief when she saw the house, a feeling of coming home. And having to stop and correct herself, remember that she was in a strange and dangerous place” (190). These thoughts show Dana's conflicting emotions regarding the plantation and what it meant to her. Although it was a place where she had felt a lot of pain, she had also had some good experiences there and formed strong emotional connections with some of the people there. With this, Butler tries to convey that home can sometimes contain painful or dangerous things in addition to the good things, but it will always be home if that is how it feels. In Kindred, Butler complicates the concept of home by showing that home is not always the place we feel safest, nor the place we always want to be. Robert Crossley argues that Butler, along with Kindred, offers a challenge to the phrase "Home is where the heart is," as well as other phrases, which essentially mean that home is the place where someone one always aspires to be. He writes: "By the time Dana's time travel finally ends and she returns to her Los Angeles home in 1976, the sense of a homecoming has become