Just not that into It

This new book, Kindred, in my opinion is not up to par with the previous books we have read. I am also not a fan of the plot, it seems to me that the story is developing to slowly and it is also failing to demand my attention. It can also be that I am failing to make a connection with the book itself because there are no qualities that I can share with the characters. Perhaps I am not too far into the story because I also felt that the story is progressing really slowly.

Unlike the other books we have read this one is missing a certain aspect, like The Man in The High Castle where it challenged us with the idea of authentic versus fake. Then Tim ‘O Brien plays with our emotions with vivid details. I just do not see those type of things in Kindred.

(On a different note, if you get a chance read Camus the fall it also brings up the idea of authentic and fake but every time is also depicts his reality being shattered. It’s a short book too, but you might need to read it a few times to catch it.)

The Buffer

When I started Kindred I was on the train and looking forward to some light reading and preparation for class. Well, instead of that I spent a few hours of my train ride entirely absorbed and clenching my teeth at the violence. I found it interesting in class when Janelle brought up that we were so focused on time travel and that we did not even discuss the racial issues until the end of class. I never realized how easy it was to ignore the difficult part of the text and talk about something we are more familiar with. It’s interesting because I knew I dived right into the time travel conversation, not focusing on what the book was actually about even though when I read it my emotions were challenged.

I think it is a mark of a good book when you avoid the true focal point because it is hard to put into words. There is no doubt that the events we read about were horrific, but they were nothing we never knew of before. The first person perspective is what made this novel come to life because we were getting a first hand account. Not only that, but nothing was glossed over. The details were not far-fetched or overdone, they were accurate, to the point, but at the same time fast-paced so we felt the action and the suffering. What we read is not easy to talk about because we know for a fact that the suffering Dana occurred actually happened, much like The Things They Carried. As time travel is a buffer for this book, seeing it from the writers perspective over 40 years later was the buffer in O’Brien’s book. If there were no buffer, it would not have been such a good book. It would have made it too real. Because of the science fiction elements in Kindred we are in the moment, not just reading the reflection but we are able to catch our breath in the familiar and the calm when Dana returns to 1976.

Coping with reality

“But I got used to them very quickly. And I began to get into Robinson Crusoe. As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble” (Butler, 87)

I found this quote especially interesting to the plot of the book. Although this quote is said from Dana’s perspective, Rufe also uses an escape to cope with his own reality. Dana uses Robinson Crusoe to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble to take the pressure off her own troubles. Her troubles amounted to more then just stress, but constant nervousness and protection, even defending herself from death. Dana uses the fictional world to escape her own harsh realities, and Rufe uses Dana to escape his.

Rufe uses Dana as his Robinson Crusoe to escape his realities of whippings, strict parenting and rules, pressure to be just like his dad. When all this amounts to the breakpoint, he retaliates by burning down curtains, stealing his dad’s passions. However, Dana is always there and literally shows up out of nowhere like a fictional character in a fictional world to relieve Rufe of the stress and corruption he is dealt day in and day out. We all have these tools to escape whether we are aware of it or not, music for example. There’s a certain comfort to problems that aren’t necessarily yours because you are not faced with their reality, no matter how bad it sounds, it’s the truth.

There's a Twilight Zone episode for everything.

Time travel what-if: If you could go back in time to kill baby Hitler... could you change history?

Rufus ain't your little Rufe no more!

In the classic debate of nature versus nurture, I stand by the power of nurture. We all have our reasons, whether or not we’re aware of them, for our existences, and drawing on stereotypes and similarly shallow understandings only propagate more misunderstandings that could be prevented if we widened our perspectives and tried to sympathize with another before judgments are cast. With Rufus’ development, however, I find my stance harder to support. Given his possessiveness (towards Alice and Dana), insincerity (the letters), and narrow thinking, it’s as if Dana’s efforts to ward off societal influences were futile. Even though Dana’s involvement in his life cannot reverse the moral disregards accepted as norms in his time, as the story develops, sympathizing with Rufus becomes progressively harder. On page 117, when Isaac pummels Rufus for attacking Alice, Dana also becomes aware that she, rather selfishly, needs Rufus to remain alive for her existence though killing him would bring an end to the pain and suffering that he inflicts upon many others.

It’s easy to compare Rufus to his father and to even blame the change in Rufus’ behavior on his father, but I find that in many ways, Weylin is more of a product of society than Rufus. Though Dana personally fears him, she realizes that he “wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (134). We do not know of Weylin’s past, but it is probable that he too experienced life on a plantation from the perspective of a son to a well-off slave-owner. He lived in a time when racial discrimination permeated all of society and that brutalizing and enslaving fellow humans based on their skin color was a norm. There was no figure akin to Dana that could have intervened in his life to provide a different perspective; society shapes our understanding of morals. Yet, Weylin, unlike Rufus, honors his word regardless of color. This struck me as incredibly respectable and odd. Weylin, who we are introduced to as a man capable of treating his family coldly and slaves inhumanely, keeps true to his morality with a sense of basic dignity and respect for blacks that the whites of the antebellum South would have scoffed at. Rufus, who has the life-changing (literally) experience of interacting with Dana and having been given the chance to change, fails to adopt his father’s rare and perhaps, only, good trait.

Dana’s choice, however, to continuously save Rufus and see him in a better light strikes me as morally illogical. The slaves that think of her as a sell-out, a “white nigger,” promptly capture my sentiments as the divide that Dana has drawn in choosing Rufus, the white men, “them,” over “us,” her fellow slaves, her black kin (though, yes, Rufus is equally kin) becomes strikingly clear.

"... lies like the truth"

My version of the book Kindred actually has an introduction section by Robert Crossley. One of the things he mentions in the first paragraph of the narrative is that time travel became necessary in the book because Octavia Butler wanted to recreate a first person slave memoir. The paragraph ends with the sentence, “Like all good works of fiction, [Kindred] lies like the truth” (pg. I). The book was essentially written to reveal the truth about slavery as experienced by an individual in the present world. Setting the book within the premise of time travel does add to it an element of intrigue. But time travel, being a physical phenomenon that has not yet been proved, also gives it an air of untruth to begin with. However, I feel that the emotional truth conveyed by a first person narrative is powerful enough to dismiss the skepticism elicited by scientific fantasy. Perhaps this is why Butler was willing to give up physical truths for the sake of emotional truth.

In the macro scale, Kindred lies like the truth because it narrates to us the first person account of slavery through an individual who isn’t actually a slave, but it’s the credibility of a first person account that makes our “stomach believe” the savagery of slavery.

Kindred also lies like the truth on several micro scales. We see several instances in the book where the protagonists have been thrust into their unnatural roles. For instance, the familial tie between Rufus and Dana gets blurred because Dana chooses “weak lies” in favor of the truth that would make Rufus “question [her] sanity” (28). However, we can immediately sense the kinship between the two. We can even sense a kinship between Tom Weylin and Dana when he tries to protect her from Mr. Franklin (Kevin). Even in their untruthful relationships, we sense the underlying truth.

As another example of unnatural roles, the husband and wife relationship between Kevin and Dana gets molded into that of a master and slave in antebellum South. We sense Dana’s insecurity in their unconventional relationship as an interracial couple when she is scared that “some part of this place would rub off on him” and “mark him somehow” (77, 78). She does not worry the same for herself, which implies that she thinks the environment will impact the two of them differently. She thinks that the once thrust into the world where the difference between whites and blacks is overstated, the differences between them, as individuals belonging to different races, would follow suit. Their unnatural roles reveal the truth about their hidden differences.

The Role of Truth and Lies within Kindred

"Weak lies. But they were better than the truth. As young as the boy was, I thought he would question my sanity if I told the truth" (Butler 28).

Characterized by this short excerpt, there is almost a role reversal for lies within Kindred. Typically, lies would discredit ones character--however, Dana's lies are the only thing that keep Dana believable to the other characters in the antebellum South. The truth is so absurd in this novel that any lie would almost be more accepted. Even in the case of Kevin, it extremely difficult for Dana to get her husband to believe her; we would expect Dana to have immense credibility with Kevin, but it is only when he is taken to the antebellum South that Kevin actually believes his wife.

Unlike the typically lies told in everyday life, lies in this novel are not malicious or ill-intentioned. Rather, the lies in this novel serve as a function of survival. In this sense, Kindred relates directly to The Man in the High Castle, where the fake identity of many good-natured characters saves each individual's life in a corrupt world. Although the world is not fake in Kindred and is suppose to represent a real time period in the United States, in many ways the antebellum South is a dystopia similar to the world in The Man in the High Castle.

"Trained to accept slavery"

In an interview, Octavia E. Butler explains, “Kindred is not science fiction. You’ll note there’s no science in it. It’s a kind of grim fantasy.” Though we may not have cracked the code to time traveling, Butler’s story contains a lot of truth—truth we feel uncomfortable facing and accepting. She mercilessly immerses us into the culture of the antebellum South in 1819—a culture of slavery and cruel discrimination. What struck me most about this journey back in time is how easily Dana and Kevin acclimatize to life on the plantation of a slaveholder. Initially, it would never occur to me that it was even possible to grow accustomed to such a chauvinistic society, but over time the couple finds itself slowly adapting to its new environment.

Upon their arrival, they were forced to take on the roles of slave and slave owner to avoid any dangerous complications with Rufus Weylin’s family—but these actors started getting far too used to their roles. When Tom Weylin catches Dana leaving Kevin’s bedroom early one morning, Dana feels as though she were “really doing something shameful” (Butler 97), despite Kevin being her husband. The pressures of society are conditioning her to accept the restrictions and prejudice she is constantly subjected to. She even confesses, “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery” (101).

Moreover, the most Dana and Kevin complain about on the plantation is boredom. Kevin complains of the tediousness of having to be sociable with the guests who visit the Weylin plantation, while Dana complains of the boredom of doing mindless household tasks. These seem like the last things someone should be complaining about when trapped back in time on the property of a heartless slaveholder.

When Dana is brought back to the plantation after being home for eight days, she catches herself saying, “Home at last” (126). Calling the plantation where she had been forced to sleep on the floor, live in filth, and be whipped her home was more than a red flag that Dana’s role play was beginning to take over her life. A similar event takes place when Rufus forces Dana to throw her map of Maryland into the fire to avoid getting caught reading again. Rufus assures Dana she can do without the map, “You’ll be all right here. You’re home” (143).

The more Dana and Kevin become a part of the Weylin household, the more they grow accepting of the ignorant ideals of this particular segment of history. What’s worse is through Dana’s first person narrative, we feel as though we are experiencing the hardships of slavery firsthand—in turn, making it all the more believable that over time anyone could be influenced by the pressures of society no matter how unjust. If we were thrown back in time and shoved into the same situation as Dana and Kevin, would we too begin to lose track of our ideals over time?

Losing yourself through time travel

“And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting” (98).

I found this quote to be especially interesting because I feel that Dana is completely wrong in this respect. The reason she and Kevin fit in so well is because they have fully become integrated in their antebellum roles. There are numerous instances when we see how easy Dana seems to forget certain aspects about 1976. For example, when Nigel asks her to read she is completely caught off guard: “The request surprised me, then I was ashamed of my surprise. It seemed such a natural request” (98). It's evident that she is already forgetting typical behavior and questions that she would hear in 1976.

Additionally, when Dana returns to 1976 without Kevin, she finds it impossible to fully live her old life. During the eight days she spends home, her behavior implies that she is waiting to return to the South, rather than enjoying her last days of freedom before she returns back to the South. She has grown used to living in this world of cruelty. I think she’s conditioned herself to accept being treated as a slave and has forgotten certain behaviors from 1976. When she returns to California, she has a difficult time slipping back into her twentieth-century self.

A Balance of Truth and Lies

About a year or two ago, I started writing a fan fiction (insert a groan in here if you really must). This particular one involved two brothers whose lives altered after a chain of events, sending them on a path to grow up as assassins. The other most defining part about the story was that the older one could speak nothing but lies while the younger one could only speak the truth. Even in their thoughts they stuck to this pattern.

Then I stopped updating the story for a good number of months due to various reasons. Over the summer I picked it back up and I’m currently trying to end it. That’s when I noticed how hard it was to have the two maintain their pattern of speech and thought. The younger one couldn’t say anything sarcastic which limited how he responded to some people. His brother, on the other hand, was sarcastic twenty-four/seven or just said a lie in the wrong moment. It became an imbalance that only worked itself out when the two were together.

There is no real flaw for having the two set up that way (well, ignoring the fact that it is really hard for someone to keep that up all the time). However, I found it hard to separate the characters because they worked well together. This is like how truths and lies work together. One can rely completely on one or the other, but it’s hard just to survive on one. Pure truth can be harsh or bland, while lies deceive and often leave a bitter feeling. Most lies that people make up have some base in the truth, while many people would say that using a “white lie” once in a while isn’t that bad. Socially we understand that there is a balance between the two that we try to achieve to live happy lives.

Would speaking only one or the other destroy itself? Probably not, but it will make things a whole lot harder to communicate. It also would make the world a bit boring if you only write truths or lies. There’s a happy medium here, and we’re all pretty much living it.

The end of the story won’t allow the two to continue a polarized life: they will begin to speak with both truth and lies. They deserve a chance to express themselves fully. I hope they like the freedom of full expression.

Bringing Back Culture

In class we discussed the things Dana gets to carry with her when she moves from one time and place to another. One of the first things we mentioned was her bag with clothes and a knife, then we went on to add to that list her knowledge. In my opinion her culture is one of the most important things she maintains when traveling between the two drastically different time periods.

The discrimination she has experienced as a black woman in the 1970s added into the way race is discussed in her workplace form the ideals she maintains when she visits Rufus. In her life, her interracial marriage with her husband is considered controversial, or at the least uncommon. In her workplace terms that refer to racial relations and the slavery. Dana realizes that these words, while not meant in a literal manner, are unacceptable and when she travels to visit Rufus, she seems them used in a literal and very real manner. She tries to change the way Rufus views society and societal norms through her own perspective. This desire to inflict your own views onto another person is a rational idea, especially since your views stem from you wholeheartedly believing that you are right. This task, however, is much more difficult than it may seem at first. Dana is trying to impress upon a child ideals and values which, while applicable in the 1970s, are unfounded in the early 1800s. Everything she bases her opinion on does not hold true in the antebellum south. Rufus cannot understand why he is not allowed to use the word nigger because for him, it is simply what the slaves are called. As a child I don’t think he realizes the effect of that word. She also tries to impress upon him the importance of treating slaves in a dignified manner. This is an incredibly daunting task since he never sees anyone else with these same values. His parents treat slaves with disdain and the only person telling him to to break this tradition, is a salve herself.

Her culture is also incredibly important to her because it is what keeps her from conforming to this new society into which she is thrown. When traveling back in forth, it can be dangerous to take things back and forth with you. This is Dana’s biggest fear as she worries that Kevin, who is already slightly conforming to the society of the antebellum south, will change too much.

Terminated

In class we spent a while talking about time-travel and it's place in the novel. I felt the same way and began to get engrossed in the conversation. I'm accepting the major plot twist of Dana actually being a terminator sent back in time to crush a leader of the human resistance. It seems to be a possibility at the very least. Or, perhaps she has been sent back in time by the human resistance to guard Rufus, a key leader in the movement against skynet.

Of course, I kid. What struck me in class on Thursday was the realization that we spent so much time talking about time-travel and yet ignored the horrors of slavery that existed on the pages before us.

In a very real sense, the ideas of time-travel allow us to ignore the very hard subject of actual slavery that is presented. Yet, we must consider the novel as essentially a tale of slavery with elements of science-fiction. Although the plot is built up by the elements of time-travel, what we are dealing with in the 1800's is not "science fiction." It is what occurred during the time in America. Slavery existed and is a factual part of the American history. Although time-travel might be a softer subject, I don't believe that we should focus on it reading Kindred. Instead, we should consider it as essentially a novel of mixing cultural values when people from a different time and place meet and become forced to experience the time.

The one thing that truly bothered me in the novel was a saying of Dana, "'People don't learn everything about the times that came before them...Why should they?'" This acceptance of ignorance strikes me as something truly shocking. Although I would assuredly agree that individuals don't know everything about the history that has come before them, this callous acceptance of shrugging off the past is upsetting. This knowledge is the collective history of all of mankind, what unites us and bonds us together. Ironically, Dana and Kevin abstain from mentioning to Rufus that in about fifty years, America will fight a war and finally emancipate the slaves. History, although perhaps not a measure of pride, consistently unites us together as it has formed our present and provides ample guidelines for the future. Just as Dana was relatively unaware of history, she is also unaware of her family history and genealogy. By learning more, she will begin to formulate and revise her own identity and the ideas of her origins.

Facing the Truth

All of us know that slavery happened. We can all agree that it is wrong to consider an entire race of people as inferior just because of the color of their skin; that it is wrong to consider people as property and treat them like animals or worse. We might even know the intricate details about how many slaves there were, how many plantations there were, details about what they had to go through. But is this facing the truth about slavery? What does it mean to face the truth about slavery?

Most people are ashamed that this happened in our country not so very long ago and would swear that if they had been there, they would not have stood for it. They would have helped free the slaves and would have condemned all those who accepted it as pure evil. This is easy for people to say because it is in the past. We did not have to live through it. Kindred shows us that it is not as simple as we think it is.

As we have learned in this class, the details about what happened does not communicate the whole truth. The truth is in the emotion. Kindred communicates the truth to us through emotions. We follow two people from near our own time and watch as they are exposed to slavery and racism in the 1800s. We are up close and personal to the violence, rape, whipping, foul language, manipulation, and mistreatment that goes along with it and are properly shocked and horrified. But we are also thrown into the culture of the time, the atmosphere, the daily life around the atrocities. We adjust as Kevin and Dana do. Dana is disturbed by how “easily [they] seemed to be acclimatize” (97). Kevin goes as far as to say “this could be a great time to live in” (97) and mentions that the plantation “isn’t what he would have imagined. No overseer. No more work than people can manage…” (100). Slavery is not as bad as he thought it would be.

We also come to realize that maybe a white plantation owner is more human than we think. We recognize Tom Weylin as a perpetrator of horrible atrocities to his slaves but we also catch glimpses of his morality when he disapproves of Kevin’s fake plan to betray Dana or when he allows Dana to stay so that she can help his son.

The truth that we are not facing normally, that Kindred helps us to face, is the fact that the people who lived with slavery were just as human as you and I. They were brought up in the culture and society of the time, and this is why they let it happen. We need to face this truth so that we can examine how we were brought up, how we are affected by our society, and make sure that we like who we have become.

Progress Without Progressing

In class we talked about how we have the same issues today as we did “back then.” Butler uses the time travel to help make the similarities easier to see. For instance, in 1810 the attitudes regarding men vs women are very obvious and apparent and Butler exemplifies that through Mr and Mrs Weylin. In 1976, Kevin cant understand why Dana wont type up his novel for him. This encounter between Kevin and Dana resembles the same “men are greater than women” attitude as it was in 1810. Juxtaposing the two makes it more clear to us that we still have the same issues today as we did in the past, just with a new face.

I can somewhat agree with what the author is bringing to our attention. I think we, as a whole people, have come very very far in gender and race relations. But I also think that some of the same old ideals still exist. For example, even though title nine exists and therefore mens and womens college sports are to we equal, they still don’t get the same respect. We have made progress so that its accepted that women play sports but as of now they don’t get the same high regard as a male athlete does. This could be a stretch but it resembles how women weren’t allowed to own land or be educated “back in the day.” They weren’t as highly regarded as men back then. And clearly today some of that still lingers with us.

Reality

What I found very interesting in Kindred is the idea of a dominant reality. In the prologue, we’re brought into the story in 1976. I initially believed that 1976 was the “dominant” time period of the novel because it is introduced as the first setting, and also because we usually consider the more modern time period as the “actual” reality. As the story progresses however, it seems that 1976 serves merely as an anchor; a time period that the reader can always refer back to throughout the rest of the story, while the early 1800’s becomes Dana’s dominant reality.

When Dana is present in her 1976 reality, she seems mostly concerned with her reality in the 1800’s. And when she’s in the antebellum south, she does not seem to have any thoughts of necessary return back to the modern west coast. After her second trip to the south, Kevin assists her in preparing for her next disappearance; packing a bag of necessary survival items and a change of clothes. Her modern reality starts revolving around her reality in the south, as every waking moment she seems to have in 1976 is spent either discussing events she experienced in the south, or preparing for her next trip. Dana’s actions in 1976 are also dictated by this newfound ability to travel to the 1800’s. When Kevin tries to convince her to visit the hospital, or when he wants to go to the library to do research, she refuses to go because she is afraid that she may disappear while in a place less safe than her home. We see that as her capability of movement increases in her 1800’s reality, which in turn restricts her capabilities in 1976. (This is ironic that she is more restricted in a sense during a time period that is supposed to grant individual freedom). The reality of her life in the south then begins to dictate her action in the west, and the 1800’s emerge as her dominant reality.

The dominance of the southern reality also surfaces when both Kevin and Dana travel to the south together. Kevin proposes that he “scare [Dana] home,” (p. 84) although she refuses his offer, asking for six more weeks to “make a haven for [herself],” (p. 84). Dana seems to have no second thoughts about how six weeks will translate into lost time in 1976, and the word “haven” indicates a desire for permanent safety in the south, implying that she views it more of a permanent reality than her 1976 reality.

The prologue foreshadows the possibility that Dana’s dominant reality may shift again. Lying in the hospital in 1976, saying that she “lost about a year of [her] life,” (p. 9) she seems to be doing the opposite of what I noted above. She has left the safety of her home, and she has recognized losing time in 1976 by travelling to the south. Perhaps then her idea of a dominant reality will shift once again, and therefore change our idea as readers of dominant reality. We see that dominant reality is therefore something that can be chosen, or changed. Like in The Man In The High Castle, different people may have different perceptions of reality, shaped by their own beliefs or outside events. We can be a Mr. Tagomi, and try to ignore one reality and live only in the other, which Dana seems to start doing in the first ninety pages of the novel. Or we can be a Julianna and recognize both realities, and choose what to do following that recognition, which is what Dana could do at a later point in the story.

Time, Space, Time-Space, Oh My!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel

If you aren't in the mood to read a monstrously long wikipedia article, scroll down to "Ideas from Fiction" section for the little animations. I found it extremely helpful.

And on a side note, I don't like the new cover. In comparison to the older cover with a female in a white dress standing outlandishly in a field with a mixed expression, the new representation of Dana seems too passive and meek.

More Meta-ness and multiple perspectives

Usually, the reader is a “Kevin.” At first, Kevin does not believe Dana’s time traveling story just as readers tend to discard fiction novels as a made up otherland. Going back to the beginning of the year when we read Bierce, most of the class questioned the veracity of Peyton’s escape and wrote it off as imagination. But, just how Kevin is forced to drop his disbelief about Dana by time traveling with her, the reader is forced to drop their disbelieves in order to learn from the text. We can write off Kindred as a science-fiction novel and focus on the time travel aspect, but we will not gain anything from the text if we do so (maybe some more theories on whether it is possible or not). We must drop our doubts of time travel and think, “Ok, Dana can time travel. So, what insight do we gain in going back in history and how does that influence our present?” This is when it is important that the novel is written in Dana’s perspective. As a reader we begin as Kevin, but the first person narration stylistically forces us to enter into Dana’s view point, which is how we learn about her situation and thus the themes of the novel, such as identity, race and the fragility of relationships.

Today we did our mid-year evaluation. I think one of the goals of the class is working towards is for us to move from “Kevin” to “Dana” readers. We are learning how to see the truth in fiction, even when its filled with lies as well, and how that truth exposes something in our reality. I think Kindred is a great reflection of where I am-although I still have some aspects of Kevin, I am willing to let that go and enter into Dana’s perspective only.

However, I do still think Dana can die in the 1800’s once Rufus and Alice procreate in the past.

Our Inability to Handle Change

Change does not sit well with people. Being put in a place or situation, in which we are unfamiliar with, causes us to have stress and anxiety beyond our normal levels. This is because we work throughout our life trying to becoming familiar with our surroundings, thus creating a place where we feel safe. I can remember when I first made it to Hamilton this summer. In my mind, next to meeting people, becoming familiar with my surroundings was the most important thing I needed to do. We work toward becoming familiar with whats around us and with what we experience in order to avoid the disturbance that change can cause.

We first saw this idea of change through the characters of Juliana, Mr. Tagomi and Frank Frink in The Man in the High Castle. Their realization of another reality, a reality in which the Allies win the war, causes them to be put into different states of depression, hysteria and blindness to thought. Through the iChing, Juliana is placed into a state of indifference to what she will do with her life. She just leaves the Abendsen household not really knowing where she was going or what was to become of her life. Through a piece of jewelry, Mr. Tagomi goes hysterical trying to comprehend the world that he is put in. A world where he is no longer of automatic higher class, and where his surroundings are unfamiliar. Eventually this leads to a heart attack. Frank Frink, through his release from prison, ends up in a world which he decides not to bother with. He doesn't understand this change and acts accordingly, by living life by "Working and not thinking" (241). In each case, the change in reality, in a familiar setting, causes the characters problems in their life and in their ability to function. This change is obviously very upsetting.

We see this idea of the disturbance of change in Kindred. Dana is thrown into the world of a boy, Rufus, during the 1800's, nearly 160 years back in time. She is unexpectedly through back and forth between the two worlds without explanation or even the idea of how this was possible. This change, or shift, in her reality and world, causes her to go into a frightening state of fear and loneliness. She even compares it to the feeling one has after being raped or robbed, a feeling that she "doesn't feel safe anymore" (17). The absence of facts causes her to be put into a state of unfamiliarity, similar to that of the characters in The Man in the High Castle.

Regardless of what we may do to try and avoid situation that involve unfamiliarity, it is something we can never avoid. All we can really do is open ourself to whatever happens and make the best of the situation. Change will continue to hit us on some level, whether its life changing or minuscule, we can only choose to react with optimism or pessimism.