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.
I like your point on how a good book makes it hard to put the focus of what you are reading into terms. The reason I think that this is, happens to deal with the use of emotion and details. By being able "make the stomach believe", Butler is able to truly make us feel as if we are sharing the emotions that Dana feels. Sharing this emotion is what causes us to have a hard time putting the main topic of this story, slavery, into words. This is similar to how Dana has trouble writing out her experiences to slavery. When, through the creation of emotions, we are able to feel how the main character felt, then the author has done her job effectively.
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