Rico- “Kindred”

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.

Summary

The novel Kindred, written by Octavia E. Butler, follows the fictional story of an African American writer named Dana, who, on the day of her twenty-sixth birthday, suddenly begins transporting back in time; however, she doesn’t realize what’s exactly happening to her till later. Throughout the novel she seems to be only travel back to one particular era in time, the early 1800s, before the abolishment of slavery. This puts Dana’s life and very freedom at risk, due to her skin tone of course.

Among the first couple chapters, we learn that Dana’s travels are somehow link to anytime her southern, Caucasian ancestor Rufus Weylin’s life seems threatened. Literally, the first time Dana travels back in time, she is faced with the choice of saving four to five-year-old Rufus from drowning in a river. She, on the other hand, doesn’t get the chance to transport to her own time of 1976 until her life is threatened. Back home, barely are any time passes at all, when compared to the amount of days or months that she could have experienced the 1800s. This leads her husband Kevin to be both in disbelief and concerned for Dana’s safety, which eventually causes him to unpurposely transport back in time with her just by holding her. Kevin’s life isn’t much in danger though, since he is Caucasian; the couple plays it off as if Dana is his slave, a clever plan that works for the most part.

Through the years of the 1800s, Dana both witnesses and endures the very brutality of slavery; this novel doesn’t hold back at all. Seeing this story from the perspective of an African American woman, we see the black and white conflict, and fear for who Rufus could become. Rufus is destined to get involved with a African American girl named Alice Greenwood. They would then together give born to Dana’s Grandmother. Nonetheless, the reality of how those events becoming true are from the fairytale romance one might imagine. Alice, once a free girl, is soon bought by Rufus to keep her from running off with any other guy, and she is forced into a relationship with him.

Kevin gets trapped in the 1800s after one of Dana’s travels and she is determined to reunite with him once she gets a chance to go back. This tragic world doesn’t make it easy for her to do so though, and living with Rufus turns out to be more of struggle than an interest insight into her ancestry. Shortly after Dana’s grandmother’s birth, Rufus becomes emotionally infatuated with Dana too and she is focused to kill him out of defending her own free will.

What I was “Reading For”

I was was initially introduced to the novel of Kindred after reading Butler’s well praise fantasy, drama Fledgling in my Experiencing Literature course last semester. In this novel, she puts a twist on the fictional genre of vampires and doesn’t have the “vampires” abide by the same notorious rules as traditional ones do. The novel treats these creatures as their own species and let’s you feel for them, for they deserve rights. This puts them in the conflict as African Americans, or any other race trying to treated fairly, though these “vampires” don’t ever abandon the notion of mostly keeping their existence a secret to the public.

I was told by my instructor that Kindred, much like Fledgling, keeps the reader invested by surprising them and making him or her feel very uncomfortable, up to a point where the reader will literally put down the book and think, “What the bleep did I just read!” In addition, I was told that the main character of Kindred could travel through time, randomly and without a machine of any sort. That intrigued me even more.

I was expecting a fantasy, with perhaps some sci-fi and mystery moments, that would have an interesting story. Something that throw a twist on the cliché concept of time travel. I guess now, since I am familiar with the term, I can say that I was looking forward to having an mimetic experience when reading it. I had no idea how or when I’d get to read it though. I’m not much of a reader and basically put the book on the back burner. So, when I realized that our How Writers Read class would allow every student to propose a novel of four to read over this semester, I made sure to mention Kindred. That mimetic experiences I was hoping you pretty much followed me till two-three chapters into the novel. By then I was examining it much more like a writer and picking up on some of the things we learned. My “Reading For” soon became a synthetic experience. Our group was pretty on point with the novel’s premise and controlling values, and I kept seeing hints of those values everywhere.

My group on the other hand, as far as I could tell, was having a more thematic experience with it. They enjoyed the stories conflicts on race and how it touched on thing that people deal with today. The characters Dana and Kevin, from the novel, are an interracial couple, which is almost still frowned upon in America today, let alone our area in which we live in. Even my father came from living in Philly his whole life; he’s experienced living around blacks and other races first hand. He knew the environment and the struggles that occurred between different people. He has an stereotypical assumption for some people that he is not close to, and all and all would really prefer that his children don’t get involved in interracial dating and such. That being said, my dad just wants use to be happy and has said that he would sacrifice his own beliefs to see use feel that way. He kind of has to now anyway, since sister is currently dating a mostly trinidadian guy her age, but it digress.

Sofia has mentioned in her blog for Kindred how she has never had the opportunity to meet her father’s side of her family. I can’t imagine what that must be like; to know that certain, if not many, people exist in your family far away from home and you barely know anything about them and can’t connect with them at all because they rejected your father’s choice in marriage. I can understand why Sofia had such thematic experience with this novel, she even finished reading it before me. Prejudice and racism of course still exist in our world today. Just living in America I am surrounded by the conflicts of it, and maybe I was having a sort of thematic experience too, I just am a little tired of this conflict. The conflict is there and the same things are said about what should be done again and again, people get so obsessed with hating prejudice people and trying to prove them wrong; no one needs that kind of stress in their life. So, whenever the topic is brought up again I get bored of fighting it. Some people, like certain one even in my group I’d imagine experience racism everyday and they feel that the world has to change and that these powerful beliefs of equality have to be said, while I just feel like it doesn’t matter what we same because the conflict is both onerous and unchanging. Even the author of Kindred uses this conflict to drive her story and warn people that, no matter how much time passes, the world may never change. People like me avoid the problem and have given up on fighting it. Kindred places the conflict of now, and even long ago, right in your face and there’s no way of getting around it. It really wants people to not get tired of the conflict or give up. I myself was thrown into the loop of the controlling and opposing values of this story.

The Controlling and Opposing Values

Premise: What if an African American woman traveled back into a time period where her kind wasn’t free?

Controlling values:

Context 1: The longer you remain ignorant to your surroundings and what is happening to you the more likely you are to fail.

Purpose 1: The quicker you can figure out your surroundings and what is happening to you the more you’re likely to adapt to them and succeed within their bounds.

Opposing Controlling Values:

Context 2: If you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong, you get dragged off the path of success.

Purpose 2: If you mind your own business you’ll have a better chance of succeeding.

In Kindred, like briefly touched on in the summary above, Dana it thrown into the early 1800s by an almost unexplainable phenomenon. My group, both during and after reading the book, still have idea why or how this was happening to Dana. All we know is that Dana seemed transport back to Rufus’s time only when he was in grave danger, sometimes almost literally. Dana then could not travel back until her life itself was threatened greatly. That’s it. It amazes me that Dana didn’t look in to this struggle farther. She most of the time got either carried away with the challenges she was facing in the other time period or she intentionally tried to avoid questioning the phenomenon herself. It was just too difficult to figure out alone and she wasn’t about telling everyone about her experience.

Transporting in an earlier time period for reasons unclear to her, Dana had to always act fast. She had no time to find out why she can travel through time all of a sudden. Where am I? What year is it? What kind of trouble has Rufus gotten himself in to now? If she didn’t figure out or ignored these questions she risked Rufus’s life. At the same time, if she went around, poking her nose in to every little thing it may have risked her own life. She was now an African American in a time slavery. This time was not her own. She had little power here, without much of a way of gaining it either. Sometimes was forced to be a slave herself. She knew her rights, according to her time period, and didn’t believe in what was happening to her people, yet there wasn’t much she could do about it. The mission wasn’t to be another Harriet Tubman or Abraham Lincoln, even before they began their parts in the conflict of slavery. Dana’s challenge was personal and often dealt with Rufus or finding her husband again when he was trap in the 1800s. She had goals, but sometimes had to settle for less and stick to herself. She had to listen to the whites and take her wiping like the rest of her kind. Dozens of times Dana got involved in situations and discussions where she had two choices, to ignore the problem or face it, and how can you face a problem that you have no power over changing? This is why I said before that I myself was put in to the loop of the values. I didn’t want to read a story about the conflict of prejudices and racism, I didn’t want to deal with it in my own life, still I had to do so that I could have that memetic experience I wanted in the beginning. Plus, it involved the very success I needed to get a good grade for the class.

Reading this novel entirely through has allowed me to see the values within the dialogue of the story, and has given me more insight when creating a value graph for it:

This is a conversation between Dana and the head slave of the Weylin house, Sarah. She has been living with the Weylins for a long time and has ran in to Dana a lot over the years. Also, her own children were sold away by Rufus’ mother. This woman has suffered plenty and has probably lost all hope. Another slave is Tessa, who basically has been used in every sense of the word by later in The Fight chapter. Sometimes even Dana herself stopped fighting back. She would say “Yes ma’am,” and do whatever Rufus’ mother told her to do. In some conversations, might I add, Rufus would play the “interfere, gain knowledge” role and Dana would tell him to let things go. It went back and forth all throughout the book, with mostly the “should stay ignorant” one win every time, at least till the end. In the end, like I stated in the summary, Dana won’t take it anymore and kills Rufus before he can rape her. Saving herself win out and breaks the cycle of her going back in time, with the price of losing her arm, but still. In Mckee’s article he states,

“The Controlling Idea has two components: Value plus Cause. It identifies the positive or negative charge of the story’s critical value at the last act’s climax, and it identifies the chief reason that this value has changed its final state. The sentence composed from these two elements, Value plus Cause, expresses the core meaning of the story” (115).

So, since the choice to not be ignorant won, and is mostly what Dana tries to get across in the book, I would argue that it’s the core meaning. The reader should take away the idea that him or her should never stop fighting. However, why would Octavia want that as the theme, sort a speak? To give her people, African Americans and Others suffering from prejudices and racism, hope. The African Americans of the 1800s in the book mostly did not have that, but Dana, of the 1970s, did. This the message she hopes to pass on.

Form and Genre

So about that reason of why she travels back, and how it makes the reader feel. This link has to do with either’s death. Isn’t that one of the scariest things of all? Well, unless you’re a Christian, but that’s not the point! The fear that we can lose our own lives or that a friend can lose theirs at any moment is daunting. Octavia tells this story in a way that makes us care for Dana like we would for ourselves, by describing deeply what happens as she travels back in time and by never holding back when describing the cruelty of slavery. This fear that grows within us is a mood evoked by the result of the Qualitative Progressive form. In this aspect of genre,

“qualities are inferred and felt, and thus evoke moods. A given mood, once it is present, allows us to enter another mood, or state of mind, that might follow.”

Any time Dana travels back and the experience is not pleasant.

“I bent to push him another box full, then straightened quickly as I began to feel dizzy, nauseated. The room seemed to blur and dark in around me. I stayed on my feet for a moment holding on to a bookcase and wondering what was wrong, then finally, I collapse to my knees” (13).

She doesn’t sit in the safety of a DeLorean.

“And the distant floor seemed too dark in and change. The linoleum tile became wood, partially carpeted. And the chair beneath me vanished” (19).

It’s quick, random, violent, and unavoidable.

“Why couldn’t I have had just a few days with him—a few days of peace at home?” (197)

The instance she’s dizzy we feel for her and fear the the worse. Her trip evokes a state of wonder or perhaps confusion. She then realizes that she is not surrounded by the comfortness of her home and instead in the woods, surrounded by nature. Nature is barely a worthy topic though once we understand that the world on the other side of that trip is full of danger.

“Before me was a wide tranquil river, and near the middle of that river was a child splashing, screaming . . .

Drowning!” (13)

It’s full of pain and suffering, like when she witnessed a man getting beaten.

“I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen that too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves” (36).

Dana was even molested later that night.

“I understood what the man was going to do. He was going to display some stupidity of his own” (42).

All of these events are leading up to something, and because of the prologue, we know what. We know that sooner or later her arm will get cut off. The how and why are still a mystery. Everything before she loses her arm is a foreshadowing that she’s not going to get out of this unscathed. Another foreshadowing is the way Octavia keeps hinting towards Dana killing Rufus.

“He hasn’t raped me, Kevin. He understands, though you don’t seem too, that for him that would be a form of suicide.’

‘You mean there’s something he could do to make you kill him, after all?’ ” (245)

We keep wondering if this is the moment it will happen. The prologue, as the previous example, provokes our interest and the events that follow completely mystery of how things came to this.

“A commonplace literary trope that employs qualitative progression is ‘foreshadowing.’ However, rather than seeing a single instance of foreshadowing, looking out for qualitative progressive form means locating a multitude of instances within the text that repeat with a difference (where the difference is a development or progression from the prior instance).”

So, for Kindred to be following the Qualitative Progressive form it needs to present this mood it does in more than just the prologue and that’s exactly what it does. Kenneth Burke touches on this quality of the form too.

“Instead of one incident in the plot preparing us for some other possible incident of plot (as Macbeth’s murder of Duncan prepares us for the dying of Macbeth), the presence of one quality prepares us for the introduction of another (the grotesque seriousness of the murder scene preparing us for the grotesque buffoonery of the porter scene)” (125).

With all these intense scenes, I would argue that Kindred puts a uncommon twist on the fantasy genre and is story that feels more dramatic. I say fantasy instead of sci-fi because, even though when we hear the phrase time travel we think sci-fi, this story has no sci-fi elements other than that. It takes place in a past, let alone a present, that we are all familiar with.

Intertextual Codes

If there’s one thing we should take away from Kindred, it’s that history repeats itself. Sofia elaborates on this in her blog.

“Kindred brings up issues and conflicts present today, while reconnecting us with the past. Why does history repeat itself? We have lost connection with our past. So what happens when a young African American women is brought back in time to the 1800’s, where slavery is not only legal but widely accepted? The past becomes her present.”

Readers like me can no longer ignore the issues at hand, no matter how tiring they can get. The novel reminds us of our tyrannical past and puts emphasis on the prejudices and racism that exist today. As I previously stated, Dana and Kevin are an interracial couple. Octavia highlights on the conflicts they had to go through to be together. There were both clashes of serious prejudices and inconsiderate joking prejudices.

Dana and Kevin meet at an auto parts warehouse job. After their first conversation together, a drunk of some sort that was one of their coworkers made some rude comment about them to Dana’s face.

“ ‘Hey, you two gonna get together and write some books?’ he asked, leering.

‘Get out of here,’ I said, breathing as shallowly as possible.

‘You gonna write some poor-nography together!’ He went away laughing” (54).

Another person that commented on Dana and Kevin was a woman at the labor agency that gave Dana the job.

“One of the women from the agency told me with typical slave-market candor that he and I were ‘the weirdest-looking couple’ she had ever seen.

I told her, not too gently, that she hadn’t seen much, and that it was none of her business anyway” (57).

As Dana and Kevin got closer and decided they wanted to marry, they each told their families about the engagement. Kevin’s sister’s reaction surprised him.

“ ‘What did she say?’

‘That she didn’t want to meet you, wouldn’t have you in her house—or me either if I married you” (110).

Dana’s Uncle’s reaction was worse. He felt that she betrayed her own kind and disowned her.

“ ‘He … well, he’s my mother’s oldest brother, and he was like a father to me even before my mother died because my father died when I was a baby. Now … it’s as though I’ve rejected him. Or at least that’s the way he feels. It bothered me, really. He was more hurt than mad’ ” (111).

These issues that the couple faced relate to the ones that Rufus and the woman he loved faced. Rufus and the free African American girl, Alice, were childhood friends at first. Rufus tragically fell for her when he was older, despite the fact that relationships between a Caucasian and African American were illegal back then. Sofia mentions this in her blog.

“Mixed race couples back then weren’t only looked down upon by whites, but blacks as well. Black women who were forced to sleep with White men, were seen as traders from the black community.”

Alice didn’t feel the same way for Rufus and evidently married a slave. Rufus couldn’t stand for this and rape her. He then bought her after she ran away with her husband. Her husband paid the price for trying to teach Rufus a lesson after he found that Rufus raped her. He didn’t die, but he was out of the picture, leaving Alice to spend the rest of her nights with Rufus. For she didn’t want to run away and face the consequence.

“ … My Lord, the dogs …’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I’m going to him. He knew I would sooner or later. But he don’t know how I wish I had the nerve to just kill him!’ ” (168)

Whether we want to admit it or not, prejudices and racism exist among our culture. The similar challenges in Kindred are made up from a cultural code. These kinds of codes, according to Kaja Silverman,

“speak the familiar ‘truths’ of the existing cultural order, repeat what has ‘always been already read, seen, done, experienced’ ” (241-2)

We don’t want to admit these things exist because we interpret slavery as bad. The African Americans of the 1970s, or rather most people of the present day believe that they can’t be ignorant to our past because they see it as bad and that those terrible things will repeat. Jonathan Culler discusses this in his article on story and discourse.

“I am claiming that the narratological analysis of a text requires one to treat the discourse as a representation of events which are conceived of as independent of and particular narrative perspective or presentation and which are thought of as having the properties of real events” (171).

A narrative can never hold the true representation of the actual events that took place and is always the interpretation of the narrator. Octavia has good reason to pass on the lesson of how one should address their problems instead of staying ignorant, though this lesson still derives from an interpretation.

Rhetoric of Narrative

I may have already touched of the rhetoric of the story a little bit, hardly enough I haven’t gotten the chance to do so completely. I just got done saying that Octavia wrote the novel with an intention. Rachel express her thoughts on this in her blog:

“Butler is actually writing for an audience that will be shocked or changed by this story. As she presents a first person view of slavery and pulls it to the present, Butler seems to be trying to open her authorial audience’s eyes to something they weren’t aware of before.”

I agree with everything states here, except the fact that the authorial audience’s eyes that Octavia is trying to open. It is rather the actual audience’s eyes that she wants to open. To recall, Peter Rabinowitz, in his article “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audience,” claims

“the author of the novel designs his work rhetorically foa specific hypothetical audience. Like a philosopher, historian, or journalist, he cannot write without making certain assumptions about his readers’s beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions. His artistic choices are based upon these assumptions, conscious or unconscious, and toa certain extent, his artistic success will depend on their accuracy” (Rabinowitz 126).

This hypothetical audience is known instead as the authorial audience. This audience is the one Octavia wrote for and created. They always known what Octavia is talking about. We can try to always know why Octavia does what she does, Rabinowitz actually encourages it.

“we must, as we read, come to share, in some measure, the characteristics of this audience if we are to understand the text” (Rabinowitz 126).

Ultimately, might I add to that, that we will instead become what we project that audience to be.

The book tries to ask a question too. Something for the reader to ponder on again and again. Not just the current premise, “What if an African American woman traveled back into a time period where her kind wasn’t free?”, but perhaps a deeper premise. The story, to restate differently, is about a woman of the present, (her present), linked to her ancestor from the 1800s. Dana does not know how she is able travel back in time, but she knows why she is traveling back in time. (Whenever either is near death.) With all that in mind a new premise can be form:

“What if we were tied to our ancestors in more ways than we . . .”

Realize??? No, she already knows why she travels back. Rather, “What if we were tied to our ancestors in a way that teaches experience, knowledge, or practice?” Or at least only one of those things. I don’t know. Professor Kopp is actually the one who told me the book should be asking a question. Nonetheless, I think I’m onto something. We have learned things from our parents just by being around them, talking to them, observing them, etc; we all take those things into the real world, either consciously or subconsciously. Plus, if the access to that knowledge is right in front of you, do you ignore it or try to gain it? And where will that decision lead? So this new question fits pretty well, but it still might need some work.

Octavia means to inform the reader of something and hopes that they take away many things. However, she is not technically the narrator. The story is told in first person, through the voice of Dana, our main character. She describes everything down to the smallest detail, both the imagery of her story playing out and the verbal or nonverbal communication being tossed from character to character. We don’t see other characters thoughts though, we only see Dana’s. Why would she want someone to know all that? What does she hope to gain? She might have the same intent as the actual author, but maybe there’s more of something here. Perhaps we are given what it is like to transport to another time period or live in the 1800s with every detail of the horrific experience because Dana wants to prove that such events truly occured. If someone told me that they literally time traveled I wouldn’t believe them, I would need prove. Even Kevin didn’t believe her at first.

“He shrugged. ‘It happened. I saw it. You vanished and you reappeared. Facts.’

‘I reappeared wet, muddy, and scared to death.’

‘Yes.’

‘And I know what I saw, and what I did—my facts. There no crazier than yours.’

‘I don’t know what to think’ ” (16-7).

She claims that she told so much of her first travel too.

“More composed, I went back to the beginning, to the first dizziness, and remembered it all for him—relive it it all in detail. I even recall things that I hadn’t realized I’d noticed” (15-6).

Reading that again makes me think that maybe that’s just how she tells stories. She’s a writer and has published her own book some time before the events of the story. Most writers tell every detail, or at least as much as they want the reader to know. If Kindred was an autobiography I would be convinced that this all actually happened to her. I wouldn’t need physical evidence, like an item from the past or a photo, because it was told so well. Photographs didn’t even exist back then, so rather a drawing I guess. Maybe that’s what Dana feels she can’t provide, and maybe see believes people only believe what they see. So she created something as tangible as the real thing.

Final Reflection

In grade school, and still sometimes today, reading always seemed like a lot of work. I knew I could get some out of it. Sometimes, more near my high school years, I enjoyed reading and seeing things play out. I love stories with theme and life lessons, ones with a meaning behind it all. All the same, to get to that enjoyment, to get to that meaning, I had to either be really interesting, or suck it up and do the work. There were books that I wanted to know the story of, but never wanted to take the time to read them. Movies seemed so much simpler to me, fun too. With a movie you’re thrown into the action and everything plays out in front of you. I was more of a visual learner when I was a kid, still am a bit. Seeing things play out on screen made more sense than words on a paper. That’s all they looked like, a big junk of words on a paper. And I knew they were more than that, yet in my weakness, rather laziness, I saw them as nothing more.

It wasn’t until I began writing a manuscript for my autobiography that I realized words had so much value. It might seem selfish, but read my own life was easier. I picked up on things and thought of ways I could give a meaningful scene, give a hidden theme, and where a story should go. By then I began reading other works as an inspiration for my own. Maybe in my early drafts is was more of a copy and paste method, hardly enough, I got on the right track sooner or later.

The only thing is, with every novel I read during that time, I thought there was only one thing to take away from it. That there was a certain way you had to read it, and that the theme should be clear and direct. One could just search the meaning for a work online and that would be it, there was nothing more to take away. I had the habit of projecting things onto the readings. This was dumb, or this was written by so and so, so it will play out this way; this is just like any other story, or I’d assume that there was nothing new a writer could do with the genre.

This class helped me realize how nearsighted I was. I was forced to read with an open mind and pick up on things one usually doesn’t. I was told that when something is written this way it means that and when things play out one way it may lead to so and so. I was told what controlling values were and how they drive a story. They identify the explanation of the value that changes. The sentences created here express what may be the theme of the story. I was able to pick up more on the genre being used in a story and how a writer sometimes tried to step out of that genre. Studying this helped me be more aware of the repetition and why it was being done.

I learned about the Syllogistic Progressive form and how things must unfold a certain way once the reader is aware of the story’s premise. Sometimes a book doesn’t play out the way you hope it will, but its ending was necessary, based on the things it introduced. One method I enjoyed learning was Intertextual Codes. The Hermeneutic Code gaven definition to certain events or quotes in the story. This is when the mystery was first introduced, the Proposal of the enigma; and this was a statement that was both “true and false,” Equivocation. I tell you, I’ll never watch The Matrix the same way again.

But more important, I learned how recognize the rhetoric of a narrative. I discovered that there was a voice beyond it all. A person with an intention. They mean to write to a certain audience, and that audience is always on their mind. They have an idea of what they’ll want out of the story. It governs the way they write, the words they use and the things they introduce. I bet someone would have a field day deciphering this Reflection in the same way.

So, I guess the point of this course is not to never project, but to project in a keen way that will let the junk of words feel more like such. That when you think you’re done and you know the answer, there is always room for reexamination or another interpretation. This course didn’t just help me with reevaluating readings or films, but also to reevaluate people.

Sometimes you think a person is so mean or selfish. Sometimes you think they’re OCD or a perfectionist. Especially if they’re a classmate reviewing your work, or a teacher making sure you do the homework. Sometimes someone seems happy and okay, when really they’re broken inside and just want to be understood. This class has allowed me to look past my projections on people, to challenge them and ask what if. What if they’re not selfish or mean? What if, that underneath it all, their just like me? Then they deserve a second chance, don’t they? They deserve respect. I think there’s multiple things to get out of this course. Whether it’s how we should read or how we should live, that’s meant to be taken away and never forgotten.

When I chose to Kindred within my proposal I hoped to get a mimetic experience out of it. This intention is covered more on the How Writers Read WordPress site:

“Reading for the mimetic register means reading for entering the narrative world. This calls the reader to look through the text as if it were a transparent window.”

I was just looking for a thrill ride, I wasn’t focused on the meaning of the text that might find along the way. After reading Fledgling I projected that Octavia just wrote to point of prejudices or racism. She wanted everyone to get along and she was maybe a bit preachy. Now I respect what she stressed and I understand why she touched on what so did. She doesn’t always write with a focus on equality. Sometimes she tries to grab her readers, throw them in the story and make them feel the conflict all around them. We see the struggle and limitations of this world, so we pay attention to why they exist.