Narrating Trauma in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
Narrating Trauma in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Summary/Abstract: This essay sets out to analyze the way in which African-American writer Octavia Butler engages the issue of trauma generated by the experience of slavery. It explores the narrative strategies employed by the writer in order to point out the effects of slavery on a personal present, shedding light on how the past lives in the present at the level of collective memory. The essay also dwells on the restoration of the self in the case of the protagonist who reclaims a painful past, confronts it, remembers what is lost and in the process of mourning for the losses finds recovery. By suggesting the symbiotic interplay between the past and the present, the essay points to the way in which the writer skillfully shows the impact of the trauma of slavery on the present.

• Details
• Contents