"Characters in plots"

First of all: WHOA. The blogger site looks completely different than it did the last time I posted something and now I am slightly discombobulated.

Anyways, I'd like to revisit a passage from Libra that we read kind of a while ago, but at the time I couldn't write about it because I was out of the country without a computer:

We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He [Win Everett] would show the secret symettries in a non-descript life. (DeLillo 78)

This passage originally struck me because it really rang true with the work I've been doing on my semester project, linking unrelated events and people to create a plot and "show[ing] the secret symettries in a non-descript life." It amazes me how many coincidences you can find in history, how suspicious events seem when you look at them out of their original contex, and how well life lends itself to crazy conspiracy theories. In fact, DeLillo touches on this earlier in the novel as well:

It was all so curiously funny. It was rich, that's what it was. Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish. (DeLillo 57)

Beyond this, though, it's also interesting to think that there are "themes and involute turnings" in our lives that "we have not allowed ourselves to see completely." To me, it suggests that all of our actions are somehow important in the overall history of things, just in ways we can't ever hope to really see because as individuals we have such a limited perspective of the world. It's almost like any small thing we do could end up setting into motion a change of events that we might never even know about, which is really unsettling, but also kind of cool, to think about.

Finally, the passage also reminds me a little bit of the Tralfamadorian idea of a moment being structured a certain way (I feel like I keep coming back to this concept, but it's so interesting and fits so well with the books we read!). The notion that we're all just "characters in plots," whether we know it or not, makes it seem like we have no real say in how our lives play out, but rather that the story of our world has already been written and we're all just playing our parts. I can't decide if I find this concept plain old creepy or, in a weird way, sort of comforting; I think it's a little of both.

Taking characters out of context

At the end of panel presentations last week, I was sort of conflicted by the fact that we were trying to predict how Alice would behave if she had lived in our time period instead of her own. On the one hand, I suppose it is an interesting question to mull over, but at the same time, I don't think it's really relevant to our discussion of her character.

Obviously, every person is a product of his or her time to some extent. However, exactly how much of a person's decisions are influenced by their environment, and how much simply depends on the person's nature, is a question we cannot reasonably expect to ever answer. Alice, along with Rufus and all the other characters in Butler's novel, could behave totally differently in different circumstances. Or, she could be totally the same. We can argue nature versus nurture forever and ever—and people certainly do—but at the end of the day, we'll never truly be able to know how much each of those factors plays a role in the development of a person's character and the way their lives ultimately play out, so why is it worth our time to even try to speculate?

It sort of comes down to the Tralfamadorian idea of a moment being "structured" in a certain way. Alice exists in the 1800s, and she always will, because that is the way time was set up and, no matter what happens, nothing's going to change that. Her choices exist entirely in tandem with her circumstances, and consequently it's only fair for us to judge them within that context. I mean, it's certainly interesting to observe characters outside of their usual environment, as we can with Dana and Kevin, but we can't really assert that just because they act a certain way in one time period means that they would behave similarly (or differently, for that matter) in another if we're not actually given the opportunity to see them in both situations.

Besides, how does it help us to know how Alice would behave in the present day—or in Dana's time—anyway? The fact that she exists in the 1800s is crucial to her character as we know it, and thus her behavior and decisions in that nineteenth-century context are the only important things to understanding her character. It doesn't make sense to try superimposing her life onto a 1970s backdrop because, at the end of the day, our speculations would say far more about how each of us individually view Alice than it would about Alice herself.

Thoughts on the ending of Kindred

After literally one hour of doing absolutely nothing other than cupping half a bottle of frozen Gatorade in my hands to inspire it to thaw faster, it has finally dawned on me to fill the rest of the bottle with room-temperature Gatorade, so that the frozen Gatorade makes the warm Gatorade drinkably cold whilst the warm Gatorade speeds up the melting of the frozen Gatorade. How does this pertain to Kindred, you may ask? It doesn't, actually, except that the sudden epiphany has signaled to me the apparent end of my post-soccer game braindeadedness, freeing me up to now begin my blog post—and begin I shall! Here goes:

Throughout the course of my short but satisfying lifetime, exactly six different novels have made me cry. Kindred, however, is the first novel I have ripped into six pieces after completion. (The only reason that statistic flies is because calculus textbooks don't count as novels, otherwise the drama of that last sentence would have to have been severely undercut.) But Nikita, you might wonder, didn't you say just yesterday that you liked the novel? To which I would respond: Why yes, sagacious blog reader, I did indeed say yesterday that "I do like the book, in fact; I genuinely find Butler's writing gripping and the premise of her novel interesting," and all that still holds true.

(Wowzers! Just two paragraphs in and this blog entry is already erring on the side of excessive cheekiness. I'll tone it down a bit.)

However, now having finished the novel, I can say that, even if I did overall enjoy reading it, I found it unbelievably frustrating and did not like the ending one little bit. In particular, I couldn't stand that Alice died. Anything else I might have put up with, but that really drove me out of my mind since she was seriously the only character in the entire novel that I liked from beginning to end (hence the ripping of the book; had she lived I totally wouldn't have done it).

What was frustrating to me about Alice dying before Dana killed Rufus was that it seemed to be the worst possible scenario. If she'd killed Rufus right after Hagar was born (or even earlier, although I understand that that would have complicated things severely), Alice might not have met the same end that she did, although admittedly her life might have just been made even more miserable by a new slave master. But, since Alice had already been driven to suicide before Dana killed her tormenter, the novel's dramatic ending confrontation just seems sort of rash and impractical because (1) it sends all the slaves to uncertain, but likely bad, futures, (2) it's far too late to help Alice at all and even leaves her children without the protection of a white father, and (3) it's such an ironic way to end a story whose point up until now has been that Dana's needs to preserve Rufus's life, not end it, and leaves me feeling like we've just made one long and miserable circle.

However, the worst part of the ending is that I really can't think of anything much better myself. I still think Dana should've just offed Rufus way back when he first became such a monster (I really hate Rufus and honestly see no redeeming qualities in him at all, which is significant because it's a stance I generally avoid taking on characters), even if that would have ended her own life as well (I mean, it's not like I was attached to Dana anyway), but I do understand that that wasn't ever really a plausible end to the story, nor would it have made a very interesting narrative to read.

I'm left, then, with the frustrating knowledge that, throughout that entire novel, there was really never any possibility of a happy ending. Perhaps it's childish to be upset by that fact, but what the hell—call me a child then. It aggravates me that, right from page one, Kindred shoved us all into a bottomless hole of a plot line that was uncomfortable to read about and from which there was never actually any escape, and if that is a foolish reason to not like an otherwise good book, then so be it.

But I don't know. Maybe Butler's purpose all along was to make us uncomfortable, and to prove to us that the world is ultimately hopeless, and to show us that, because we in the present day stand on the foundations laid by often unpleasant histories, we can never have truly happy endings. If that was the case (and let's be frank—it probably was), she succeeded. And admittedly, it's better for a novel to incite a vile reaction in a reader than no reaction at all.

However, none of that changes the fact that I'm woefully unsatisfied with the ending of Kindred. This, along with the fact that I've now downed enough Gatorade to make my stomach completely miserable, has put me in a grumpy enough state that I'm just going to end this here and go to bed.

Why I don't like Dana

I've had a really hard time coming up with something to blog about for Kindred, and I realized last week that it's not simply because I don't like the book. I do like the book, in fact; I genuinely find Butler's writing gripping and the premise of her novel interesting. The thing holding be back from truly engaging with the text, then, is not the plot but the characters; there's really not a single one in the book I actually like.

Generally speaking, I prefer first-person narratives to third-person ones because I like to get attached to a character and follow them throughout the novel. (If you recall from a much earlier blog post, the lack of stationary characters was one of the things I didn't like about Ragtime.) In fact, my three all-time favorite books are all in the first person, so I was reasonably excited that Kindred would be employing this traditional narrative device, unlike so many of the other books we've read this semester.

However, I've been consistently disappointed with Dana's character throughout the novel, which has completely undone the effects of a first-person narrative for me. I have a hard time relating to her and thinking of her as a real, likable person—and if I don't buy into her as a person, then why should I care about her story?

It bothers me how Dana approaches everything so rationally. I get that she's a very smart person, but I find myself looking for a less reasonable, more emotional response from her all the time, which I don't think is too much to ask of someone in her bizarre, out-of-this-world predicament. I can't stand it when she's kind of going along with the 19th century and then she'll take a step back in her mind and be like, "Okay, it's such-and-such a year, which means such-and-such has not happened yet, so I need to be doing such-and-such a thing, and blah blah blah"; it makes me want to slap her on the head.

Perhaps that made-up quotation was a very crude way of articulating exactly what Dana does that bothers me, but I can't think of any other way of describing the action. I guess, if you boil it all down, I'm angry because I think she thinks too much, which sounds like a strange bone to pick with a character, but honestly it's true. It goes hand in hand with her reading so much into everything Kevin does, clearly just looking for ways to liken him to the white supremacists she's met in the 19th century, even if there's not necessarily anything there in his behavior to warrant such analyzing.

Sometimes I just wish that Dana would have a breakdown. I can't sympathize with a character who's so freaking logical all the time—not to mention that her being that way makes it seem like she doesn't need my sympathy anyway, so consequently I'm even less inclined to give it. I think that, for a first-person narrative to really work well (work well in my mind, that is), the author needs to really try to endear their narrator to their reader. Sometimes they're successful in this endeavor and other times they're not, but with Dana I'm not even convinced that Butler's trying to make us like her. She feels very removed, despite the fact that we're occupying her head, and I think that'd be easily changed if her thoughts were just a little less put together and a little more natural-feeling.

I'm not saying a book can't be good if the main character's not likable, but it sure is a lot harder to care what happens in a novel if you don't care about the person to whom it's happening.