I've always enjoyed stories that involve time travel. It's truly the epitome of the fish out of water scenario, but in these specific situations, the main character is constantly viewing their new setting as either the origins or result of the setting they've become familiar with. It wasn't until Kindred that I realized how perfectly this represents historical analysis.
A historian is presented as a tragic hero by Butler, a soul who is forever cursed to look back upon the mistakes of the past without any ability to change them. The same is true for Dana. She is quite literally forced to view the events and ideas of the past and not only accept them as unchangeable, but also understand them as an inseparable part of her culture's history.
The framing device of time travel allows the author to give a more personal explanation of a historians process, allowing us to better understand how history affects us. In a way, the book has the same goals as many of the historical novels we've read: transforming the reader into their own self-aware historian. I really admire these books for doing this, and think that time travel has been one of the most effective so far, because of how it provides a surrogate for the reader's modern mindset.
Wow--you frame the "tragic" aspect of a historian's work in a way I hadn't contemplated before: the paradox of working to understand the past, but remaining powerless to do anything about it. With Dana, as she gets more and more involved in the story, this might seem to dissipate--she can take action!--but in fact, as we see, she remains pretty much trapped by circumstances. The scene where she talks Alice into going willingly to Rufus exemplifies her particularly "tragic" position, where her sense of what's right from the pt. of view of a 20th century woman is incompatibly with Alice's reality. There tragically is no simply "good" advice for her to give, and her role is ultimately of bystander.
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