Full Circle

During today's in-class writing, Mr. Mitchell made a comment about how the book comes full circle. We basically know what happens at the end because we've read the beginning; we know that Dana's arm is trapped, and that she and Kevin both make it home, to their time, safely. Or as safely as can be expected under the circumstances. I have always liked this literary device of wrapping a book up by starting it with the end and ending it with the beginning, so to speak, and I think in Octavia Butler's case, Kindred definitely benefited from it.

The main reason I liked the use of this "full-circle" concept is because the rest of the book, by nature of its content, is so hectic and confused. There is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, lots of nausea, lots of danger, nervousness, and anger. There are seldom any calm moments, and the very laws of time are broken by Dana's time travel. Given this, I think it's really comforting to begin at the end, to know that both Dana and Kevin are alive and at home by the end of the book, just to keep in the back of your mind while you read about their struggles in the 1800s, and to know that everything will be fine eventually.

When Butler ends with Dana's loss of her arm, even though we're technically brought back to the same point as we began, as readers, I feel as though we've gotten somewhere. At the beginning, we have absolutely no idea what Dana is talking about. At the end, we understand it perfectly well, and it doesn't seem strange to us at all that she got her arm meshed with a wall on her last time travel trip back home. I really feel like this ending bringing us back to the beginning ties up the book nicely, and puts it all in a neat package that you can understand, if not well, at least a little better.

I liked Kindred a lot, and I think this was a really practical and coherent way to end a book that could have had a really vague ending under different circumstances.