Style

I find it difficult to comment on Kindred for some reason. I think it's because Octavia Butler's style is so different from the other authors we have read this year. It's true that with books written in different or unique styles, I have a lot more to comment on in terms of images in Mumbo Jumbo or the seemingly random use of historical figures and whether or not that's entirely ethical in Ragtime, whereas with Kindred I read it more to enjoy the story than I did for any other reason. Personally, I really like her style. It's a very conventional novel, I think, and I don't mean it in a bad way.

Unlike Doctorow, Butler writes as though she is very invested in the story. There isn't as much reflection back on herself, and I feel very connected to Dana throughout the whole book. She doesn't write in a tone of detached irony, instead it's very attached, powerful, and in a lot of ways, painfully straightforward. I like it better that way. While Doctorow's writing was funny in its irony, Butler's is more emotional, and I like coming away from a book feeling like I know the characters.

Butler's story has a very linear progression. Unlike Mumbo Jumbo, where everything is so mixed up that I had no way of making logical assumptions about where the story would go, Kindred was more gripping in that I had all these different possibilities of where the story could go. It allowed me to hope and feel sad when something didn't happen the way I wanted it to, which, in the end, made me more emotionally invested in the story.

I also liked that Kindred was linear in that Butler didn't skip around in time. Well, technically she did, with all of Dana's time traveling, but it wasn't as disorienting as reading Slaughterhouse Five. There were clear causes and effects for why Dana was traveling the way she was, whereas Billy Pilgrim's time travel didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Overall, I think it's going to be more difficult for me to come up with a response paper topic for Kindred than the other books we've read. All I can really think to talk about are plot movements and character development, or how much I hate Rufus. Oh well. Hopefully inspiration will strike.