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.