Losing Dana's Arm in Kindred: How it's connected to the broader narrative

    In Kindred, by far the most interesting and symbolic part is when Dana’s arm molds into the wall at the end. It’s the part we know about during the prequel and the part we continue to keep in mind as the book goes on. A big part of this book and how we’ve looked into it is the impact it has on Dana and Kevin, and how it takes away from them and damages their brains throughout the book. As Octavia Butler says in an interview after making the book and choosing to meld Dana’s arm in the wall, she says, “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.” (Butler 267)

    A big part of this removal of self that Butler is characterizing and symbolizing happens in how the characters are forced to view and sometimes experience physical violence. It becomes, especially for Dana, that she needs to be okay with violence to survive and needs to be okay with committing some form of violence herself. She says she often watched TV shows, enough to know about forms of violence in antebellum slavery, but never experienced the “smell” and the experience of actually being there. For example when Dana fights the patroller, she has the opportunity to poke the man in the eyes and defend herself, but “the thought sickened me, froze my hands where they were. I had to do it! But I couldn’t…” (42). Afterwards she’s disappointed in herself, unable to take that opportunity. But when the man attempts rape, her mindset shift is very clear; “He was going to give me another chance to destroy him. I was almost relieved.” (43)  It shows that she has to adapt and really do what is necessary for her to survive, rather than just seeing these traumatic experiences on TV.

    Another big part of how this book symbolizes the taking away of people’s sense of self is in how it affects them in the daily experience of slavery. 1976 Dana is a very brave character who stands up for people in need, beginning with how she saves Rufus every time with no hesitation, and intends to maintain those values in 1815. However, one of the biggest problems in kindred is the issue of power dynamics and the way Dana especially gets used to the power that people have over her. In these conditions, autonomy and agency had become particularly scarce. In the fields, a woman mentions to Dana that she should “slow down! You kill yourself today, he’ll push you to kill yourself every day.” (212) While it wasn’t much, slaves would often set small boundaries like this to protect themselves, which was really the only way you could protest without pushback. Butler proves slavery wasn’t only physical but epistemic and changes the ways a person thinks about themselves, survival, and the world around them. Understandably, a lot of these feelings and a lot of the upstanding character traits Dana has are diminished, and continue to be diminished after Rufus dies. This ties into much of what the arm takes away from her, and the emotional impact it leaves on her after the experience of being in slavery. 

    Both Dana's initial experiences with violence that change her and continue to shape who she is over time (even after the story ends) trap her in the past, quite literally separating her between the two worlds. These implications of violence show us the actual effects of living through an experience of slavery and being forced to become a slave, and how the living that experience is infinitely worse than what we could imagine, based on our limited knowledge from TV shows and at most high school education. In this way, the story affects the reader too, promoting a whole other level of empathy for Dana and how we can identify with her.

                                                                    Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon Press, 1979.

Comments

  1. Eve AndersonNovember 21, 2025 at 4:29 PM

    Hi Penny! That quote from Octivia E. Butler at the beginning is very interesting. She truly did not let Dana come back whole, although I do find her methods for achieving that kinda peculiar. I was definitely not expecting Dana's arm to be melded into a wall. Your other points are also very intriguing and well put. Living through slavery really did effect Dana's sense of self. Great post!

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  2. JessyDecember 1, 2025 at 2:49 PM

    Hi! I like the concept that you shaped in this post. Focusing on the symbolism of Dana's arm being left in the wall and connected it to Butler's idea that no one comes back from slavery “whole.” Your analysis of how Dana’s mindset shifts as she’s forced to confront real violence, so different from what she only saw on TV, was intriguing.

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  3. MitchellDecember 3, 2025 at 12:02 PM

    As you describe Dana's disturbing process of "assimilation" into the slaveholding society in terms of her "getting used to it," we get a potent illustration of how the nature/nurture issue plays out in this novel: Dana can resent the power that these people have over her; she can "know" that she isn't "really" subservient to them, as she is only playing a role; she can maintain some vestige of her 1976 self internally. But she comes to realize that not much of this interior/invisible sense of self really matters in the end: if she is going through the motions of being an enslaved person *every day*, with no respite, and that all of this is starting to seem *normal* to her (so she has the luxury of finding it *boring*), then we see how she is actually "becoming" a slave as the story progresses. It isn't a sudden, violent transformation--the whipping and being sent into the fields by Rufus plays a role in "breaking" her, but worse is the slow drip of her getting more and more accustomed to answering Margaret Weylin's call, and constantly agreeing with her when she disparages Dana.

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