Everything from this post on is for Twentieth Century Literature!

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From the Systemic to the Intimate: Rufus, Dana, and "Destructive Love"

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Kindred explores in depth the question of how context shapes individuals’ values, moral compass, and perceptions of themselves and others. This is reflected not only through Dana, who gradually becomes absorbed into the alien world she’s “kidnapped” into, but through Rufus as well, as he develops in a world suffused in the context of the 1820s, but permeated by the pieces of 1976 Dana brings with her. The impact of this unusual course of development especially manifests in the deeply personal, intimate, possessive relationships he forms with the slaves he’s closest to—in particular, Dana and Alice. I would argue that Rufus’s unique brand of “destructive love” is shaped in large part by the complex, mutually dependent relationship he shares with Dana, a connection that is entirely outside of the bounds of the world he inhabits. Even as she is molded by the past, Dana’s modern sensibilities influence the way Rufus perceives his own relationships. One particularly important example of th...
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One theme that’s present throughout the novel Invisible Man, and that I touched on a little bit in previous blog posts, is how the narrator tends to pin his identity to his goals and motivations. In the beginning of the book, his status as someone who’s on the road to success, and the traits that are tied to it—his intellectual prowess, his respectability, and so on—seem to the reader some of the most prominent parts of his identity. (As I described in my previous blog post, we also see how this side of the narrator’s identity comes inherently at the expense of his Black Southern identity.) In the series events that sets him off of this path to conventional “success”—from his encounter with Dr. Bledsoe and Emerson’s revelation of his true intentions to the surreal events that occur at the Liberty Paints factory—the reader sees how the narrator’s disillusionment with the conventional idea of success and the values that must be sacrificed to earn it lead in turn to a crisis of identity. ...
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What Sets Oswald Apart?

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