As Kindred drew to an end, all I could think about was it’s prologue. When we first began the novel, I remember discussing with the class everyone’s thoughts about how Octavia Butler began the novel. As we all know, the book opens with the ending as it starts out with Dana in the hospital without an arm. Being introduced to the story with such a large event, I, and I’m sure other readers in general aren’t sure what to think. I was skeptical about Butler’s purpose in putting the ending at the beginning when we first started the novel, but I waited to pass judgement till I finished the book.
One of the main reasons I believe Butler placed the scene for the prologue is for its ability to draw the reader in. Dana losing an arm is obviously a very interesting and large deal that prompts the reader ask many questions. Reading the book I was very intrigued and wanted to keep reading the novel. Even after reading the first chapter the curiosity remains as you question how Dana’s mysterious travels to the past would in the end lead to such an intense end.
As the novel went on and we began to uncover Dana’s story, her reason (or at least the reason she believes) of being sent back in time to the antebellum south to protect her family lineage, I grew unsure of how I felt about the prologue. Dana goes through such intense events that put her life in immense danger. From one of her first encounters of the patroller who attempted to rape her if she had not hit him, to the two whippings that she has to go through because of ‘disobeying’ her role as a supposed slave, reading the story you can not tell what will happen to Dana, which goes along with the idea that the antebellum south was so dangerous for slaves that you never know what dangers they will go through. In that way, I think knowing that Dana would be alive but lose her arm felt sort of like a spoiler to me. And going back to the idea that the prologue draws the reader in, the first chapter of the novel itself is so interesting that I definitely think it would draw the reader in as well. As such, I do not think that Butler should have included the ending of Kindred as the prologue.
Erm the formatting is a bit weird, with the text having different spacing. However, contents of the text is good. Usually prologues exist as a way to draw the reader in, and give a little bit of background information. In Kindred's case, it gives us a little bit of information about Dana, and gives us a really nice hook when she loses her arm. We are forced to read the whole book in order to find out how she really lost he arm.
ReplyDeleteWe've had multiple examples of narratives for which we know something of the ending at the beginning this semester: we know the "climax" of _Slaughterhouse-Five_ before the story begins, and we also already know the bombing of Dresden is coming; we know that Oswald will assassinate Kennedy once the dated chapters of _Libra_ get to 22 November. And we know that Dana survives her ordeal in the antebellum South, and therefore there's never any real tension around her life being in danger (and, you might add, we know Kevin gets back home also--so even when she's left him behind for what turns out to be five years, and we try to grasp what that fear and distance might feel like, we do know that somehow they will be reunited). It's a curious choice, when an author willingly gives away endings like this (but history does it all the time--we often read historical narratives knowing roughly how they will end), but I'd say that the narrative tension they generate has to do with the "how" rather than the "whether"--we know Dana will survive (and we know this simply because she narrates retrospectively, so we know that she is alive to tell the tale), but we don't know *how* she'll lose the arm, and the fact that Rufus "holds" it back in the past, even as he's dying, has potent symbolic resonance for the novel's historical narrative, which has little to do with its suspenseful potential.
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