Editor's Choice

How does Rufus die in Kindred?

Quick answer:

Rufus dies in Kindred when Dana, the protagonist, kills him in self-defense. Rufus, who is Dana's ancestor, attempts to rape her, mirroring his abuse of Dana's enslaved ancestor, Alice. Dana, who repeatedly time-travelled to save him, ultimately stabs Rufus to protect herself, leading to his death. During her return to 1976, Rufus grips Dana's arm, causing her to lose part of it in the time transition, symbolizing the lasting scars of her experience.

Expert Answers

An illustration of the letter 'A' in a speech bubbles

In the final moments of the main narrative in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the protagonist, Dana, kills her ancestor and adversary, Rufus. Throughout the novel, Dana is forcibly pulled back through time, from her life in 1976 California to a plantation in the antebellum South. Each of these unwanted experiences of time travel occur when Rufus, a young white boy and the son of the plantation’s owner, is in danger. Over the course of the novel, Dana, who is black, watches as the young boy she repeatedly saves grows into a young man who enslaves and rapes the woman who will give birth to Dana’s own ancestor. In a complicated exploration of history, trauma, and guilt, Dana realizes that the survival of her own ancestral line depends upon keeping Rufus alive even while he commits violence against her distant family and, eventually, against Dana herself.

The scene of...

Unlock
This Answer Now

Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.

Get 48 Hours Free Access

Rufus’s death is foreshadowed in the opening lines of the novel: “I lost an arm on my last trip home.” During that last trip, with which the novel ends, Rufus attempts to rape Dana, who throughout the novel is said to bear a striking physical similarity to Alice, Dana’s enslaved ancestor and the long-term recipient of Rufus’s physical and sexual violence. During the attack, Dana questions the limits of her willingness to forgive Rufus for what he has done and whether that forgiveness could ever include rape or enslavement:

No. I could feel the knife in my hand, still slippery with perspiration. A slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her. [. . .] I could accept [Rufus] as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover. He had understood that once.

As he dies, Rufus holds tight to Dana’s arm and she, unexpectedly, begins to travel in time to her own century once more. In the transit through time, her arm remains in Rufus’s grasp, and she emerges in her living room with that same arm being crushed within a wall of the house.

In the epilogue, Dana and her husband travel to some of the historical locations connected with Rufus and his family. They learn that Rufus’s house was partially destroyed in a fire that was presumed to have also killed Rufus, and Dana suspects that one of the enslaved men she befriended had set the fire to cover Dana’s killing of Rufus.

She briefly describes the event of Rufus’s death to her husband, who, understanding the emotional difficulty of those final moments, gives the subject respectful distance. Thereafter, when Rufus’s death comes up, Dana simply describes it as “self-defense.” The physical scars of her visits to the past echo the emotional scars, not only of her own experience, but of the broader legacy of racial violence and its impact on contemporary life in the United States.

Approved by eNotes Editorial
An illustration of the letter 'A' in a speech bubbles

In the novel Kindred, by Octavia Butler, Rufus Weylin is the white slave owner who is Dana's ancestor. She had been pulled back and forth from her time, 1976, to his time 1800s in order to protect his life. He was the white side of her family and her black side was a slave that he had raped.

The irony of the story is that in the end it is Dana who kills Rufus. He tries to rape her and she stabs him with a knife. As he dies, she returns to her own time with part of her arm missing. That part of her body is left behind.  Rufus has his arm in his hand and that part of her arm does not return with Dana to the apartment.

Approved by eNotes Editorial