The Qualia of Slavery

Like many of the previous posts, I found Butler's quote about the intention of Kindred to be perhaps the most interesting part of the novel thus far. In a 2004 interview, she is quoted as saying “"I was trying to get people to feel slavery," and, "I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people". In that sense, it seems to me that Kindred is attempting to do to slavery in the antebellum South what The Things They Carried does to The Vietnam War; not to paint a entirely loyal description of slavery (which might have been done without resorting to time travel, or without the genre of fiction as a whole), but to capture a more basic, fundamental essence of what slavery is and what it does to those who are engaged in that kind of social system.

There are, certainly, some very noticeable differences between Kindred and The Things They Carried, particularly in tone and style. O'Brien is purposely very inconsistent with his narrative: events happen out of order, some are explained twice while others are not explored at all. Butler has imbued her protagonist with a much more linear (despite the obvious presence of time travel), objective narrative. Both stories are told in first person, but Kindred is by far more emotionally detached than The Things They Carried. Does this detract from the focus of the book,which is to achieve the same kind of fundamental understanding of slavery that The Things They Carried strives for?

While I'm currently unprepared to fully answer this question, I say tentatively both yes and no. The detached narrative style does clearly separate the experience of the reader from the experience of the protagonist in a way that, if performed in The Things They Carried, would quickly destabilize the book. What Butler does achieve, however, is a much more material grasp on what it means to be owned by another human being. Unlike O'Brien's narrator, Dana has no problem directly defining the tenets and ideas of slavery, and is not forced to describe her way around the central focus of the book. What we are left with is a very vivid, tangible experience of slavery, as opposed to the illusive, intangible picture of Vietnam that we are presented with in The Things They Carried.