A home is one of the places in which an individual feels safest and enjoys spending much of their time. In Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred, the concept of home is complicated by the conflicting emotions of the characters Dana and Kevin. This shows how the idea of ​​home can be affected by stronger experiences elsewhere. Dana and Kevin, after being teleported from one time period to another, are forced to rethink their beliefs about what home is to them. Their experience in the 19th century has caused Dana and Kevin to get used to it and feel at home. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay At the beginning of the novel, Dana feels like the new apartment she shares with Kevin in 1976 is her home. She said, after her second stay with Rufus: “My God, I'm so sore and tired. But that doesn't matter. I'm at home ". Dana has had few encounters in the 19th century because she hasn't been there for a very long time, but the experiences she has there are mostly negative. She also didn't really connect with the people there, other than realizing that some of them were her ancestors, so she naturally considers her 1976 apartment 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.” 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. After the Reader's Guide epilogue, 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 always aspires to be. He writes: “By the time Dana's time travel finally ends and she is returned to her Los Angeles home in 1976, the sense of a homecoming has become incredibly complicated. His first act, once his arm was sufficiently healed, was to fly to what is now Maryland; his house..