My Predictions for Kindred

So, we just started reading Kindred, and in honor of this conventionally straightforward narrative, I decided I would write a blog post on my predictions for how the plot will continue.  

The "main character," Dana, seems to be the center of the plot so far, which seems to be focused around her time travel from the 1970s to the 1800s. My first prediction concerns the prologue. Dana's arm has just been amputated and she and Kevin are extremely vague about why. It has still not been explicitly explained, which makes sense, considering the scene in the prologue usually occurs at the climax or end of the novel, but nonetheless, I believe there is a fairly simple explanation for why the amputation was necessary. Following the prologue, we are introduced to Dana's time travel. Through the narrative, the reader can figure out that when Dana time travels, if she moves from place to place while in the past, she will also move from place to place in the present (recall how she disappears and appears a few feet away the first time she goes back in time). Because of this example, I believe that Dana's arm having been "crushed right into the wall" was caused by her returning to the present close enough to a wall that her arm got stuck. And, as we all know, it is quite difficult to safely remove an arm from a wall, so it is necessary to amputate it instead.  

Now, you might be saying, "well, okay Lia, but this is really very simple and we all already thought of that. Do you have anything a little more exciting for us?" The answer, is yes. I have an astronomically more insane prediction to share with you. Now, I will admit that I am skeptical as to the likeliness of it coming true, but nonetheless I did say I was going to share my predictions for the continuation of the plot, so I will.  

Similarly to the first one, this prediction is directly related to the prologue. As Adi pointed out in our discussion yesterday, this novel seems a little more modern than what we have been reading so far this semester. It has the style and suspense of a detective novel and a simple narrative style that I associate with novels I would not expect to see in this class. So, in order to post-modernize (or maybe just anti-modernize, I still don't really get the differences) this novel a bit, I predict that not only will the prologue not be the end of the novel (some people were saying that yesterday), but it won't even be the climax of the novel. It will simply not happen. Generally, a prologue is either something that has happened years previously, or a flash forward to the most important or exciting part of the novel. Not only would not including the prologue later in the novel separate this novel from most modern novels, but it would also bring about the possibility that the prologue is a possible ending or a possible climax. This implies that the time travel in Kindred is the sort of time travel where Dana can change the future. The prologue that Butler includes is (well, could be) just one possible future, but it is not necessarily the only possibility.