Past and Present

As I dug deeper and deeper into Kindred, I finally began to see a common trend emerge between all the books we have read this semester, and that trend is the presence of time, both past and present. In this current book, the main character is brought back a century into time to a world much different than hers, along the way experiencing slavery alongside her ancestors. All I can think about while reading this book is an extremely well-known (and my own personal favorite) quote from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Though decades apart, Fitzgerald and the author of Kindred, Octavia Butler, are on the exact same page in believing and writing that who we are today can be accredited to the past, the paths our families and ancestors have paved for us, the things we have seen, and the experiences we have experienced.