Wow, What a Terrible Epilogue

I'll be the first to admit it's easy to close your mind to a book once you've decided you don't care for it--whether on the basis of style, theme, or plot. It's not a tendency found only in students--just think of the editors and publishers who reject a manuscript after reading the first page. But because the former group must trust the latter group to put good (or at least marketable) books on the shelves, the question "why this book?" hangs in the air, demanding a satisfactory and ironclad line of reasoning.

As comparative literature students, (or really, as readers in general), we might feel cheated or empty if we cannot answer this question. When we get to the end of the book and there is no moment of illumination, no "Eureka!" or "I get it now!" we can react in one of two ways: either the book is a poor one, or its messages are simply above us (i.e. we didn't try hard enough or are not smart enough). In a classroom setting or when reading books generally considered to be "literature," I usually react in the latter manner.

However, I am learning to challenge my reading material. My initial, not-so-positive reaction to Kindred was a moment at which I knew I didn't care for the book, but more importantly, I knew why. Oftentimes, I've commiserated with classmates about how much we hate the book we've been assigned (e.g. reading 1984 in 8th grade and not understanding a bit of it), but that's largely mob psychology. I arrived at my conclusions by myself. Maybe they're not the deepest observations I could make about a text, but you've got to start somewhere, right? You don't have to assume that everything you read in a literature course is inarguably good literature. You don't even have to agree that the professor has a "good" reason for assigning said good literature. But I have chosen to trust our professor, and want earnestly to understand what it is that this book is supposed to offer me, besides verbal target practice. 

So here I am, pocketing my skepticism as instructed. Let me set aside my complaints about cardboard characters. Let me believe that the text is more effective at getting its message across with these characters written as they are, lackluster dialogue and all. Um, here I go.

If Butler has written a plot-driven novel, it follows that it does not much matter who specifically is involved in the plot, but only what type of person. Perhaps Butler felt that too many details about her characters would cloud her purpose. If she's trying to teach us a lesson about the continuity of racial and gender-based discrimination (and it looks like she might be), she needs only representatives of those conflicting groups, not individuals. This makes Kindred more an exercise in didacticism than a work of art. If you're trying to teach a child that two plus two equals four, you say, "If Timmy has two apples and Francine gives him two more, how many apples will Timmy have?"not "If Timmy, a juvenile delinquent with an inferiority complex and a prematurely receding hairline, steals two apples from his neighbor's tree, and then trades a pack of cigarettes to Francine for two more apples, what is the probability that Timmy will become a hustler?" I personally find the second question much more interesting, but that's just me...

Anyway, ineffective tangents aside, maybe I've been using a microscope when I should have been using a panoramic lens. I was too focused on my dislike of Butler's style to notice the inequality between Kevin and Dana in their own time, for example. I won't say I like this book, but I will say I'll give it another chance.

...

(But really, Octavia Butler, "'And now that the boy is dead, we have some chance of staying that way.'"? That's your last line? Way to be morbid, and just totally off). 

Okay, okay, I'm done.