Throughout Kindred, we see the events that Dana experiences on the plantation change her in some pretty significant ways, the most obvious being the missing arm at the end. It seems like the time Dana spent at the plantation was a significant part of her life, a entirely separate chapter. It's even hard to imagine Dana really returning to normal life after this. Similarly to how soldiers have a tough time adjusting back to life and seeing it as unimportant and uninteresting after the especially intense time in the war, Dana probably will never have as interesting or dangerous experience as that ever again.
The above paragraph is certainly true, but it's important to remember that Kevin will also be facing these kinds of issues. We never really talked much about Kevin's experience of the past much in class except when it related to his relationship with Dana, which made sense considering the book talks much more about this.
In fact, having read Kindred it is hard to believe that Kevin actually spent five years living in the past. Five years! Combining Dana's trips together, she didn't spend much longer than a year living in the past. Obviously, Kevin had a much less harrowing time living in the past being a white male instead of a black female. However, it's interesting that we hear so little about it. I mean, the story is told from Dana's perspective, but even she doesn't seem especially interested about it/Kevin doesn't want to talk about it. Their only (as far as we can tell) conversation about it takes place in just three pages and what we learn is only that he bounced around from Philadelphia to Maine, New York, and Boston and also that he taught school and got into trouble for being on the underground railroad. It seems like we should hear more about his five years, or at least more details.
I guess this just shows that Octavia Butler is really more interested in portraying the relationships on the plantation than anything else. Even when she has a perfect opportunity to talk about that time period and life in the north during that time and the underground railroad, she doesn't pursue it. To make her book concise and emotionally effective I think it was probably a good choice to keep the action focused on the plantation, but it seems odd that we don't hear more about Kevin's experiences given how long he actually spends in the past.
I agree--and I insist this isn't simply a matter of the white dude wanting to hear more about the white dude. The novel sets up the whole question of how Kevin might be affected by the past, but then we don't really see him and Dana exploring this, not only as a way to let the reader know what went on, but to see how it affects them in their present-day relationship. The novel opens up questions about how well our present-day moral identities would survive in vastly different circumstances, and I want to hear more about the risks Kevin willingly took to fight the good fight as an abolitionist. It certainly seems that he, too, loses the detachment we see him embodying when they're both on the plantation, but I want the full story of *how*.
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