A Man of His Time

While reading Kindred by Butler, I was always interested in how much people changed in accordance with their surroundings, even when that was the one issue they had refused to let happen. While Rufus was a child, he was much more open to everyone, and there seemed to be a chance that he could be saved from following in his father's path. Eventhough Rufus never made the decision not to be like his father, or least I did not find him to have focused to much on it, Dana had. She had decided she would not let it happen, yet it did. He became a greedy manipulator and a slave owner who followed the customary practices as such. Dana, although she told herself she would never be able to blend in, lost track of where she stopped playing the role of a slave and when she became a very submissive one. Kevin was so changed by his five years that he had great difficulty transitioning back into his present time of 1976. He had such a hard time he verbally lashed out at Dana, and began to throw things. They all seemed to struggle with being real, or atleast what others thought was the real them. Perhaps, we are a product of our time, who are simply unable to accept our real selves of the present. If we were never affected by anything there, would be very little to us as beings. We seem to be always searching for truth to the point that we forget to find it in the present through acceptance.