An analysis of narrative form and human ontology in Octavia E. Butler's patternist, xenogenesis, and parable series

The majority of critical work on Octavia Butler's texts has revolved around various issues of race and gender. Though these works provide insight into Butler's narrative worlds, they do not adequately explore how Butler uses science fiction to incorporate and transcend constrictions that the convention of race and gender necessarily bring to a critical discussion of a writer's work. This dissertation seeks to demonstrate how Butler uses the narrative to present three different thought experiments. Each experiment tests conceptions and preconceptions that human beings have concerning the maintenance of the “human” image. Her series center on three intimate phenomena—the mind, the body, and language—by which humans define themselves. In each series, Butler alters certain narrative conventions to position the reader as historian, sociologist, and, finally, as reader. In their various roles, readers are challenged to reassess their, perhaps, accepted understanding of their definition of “being human” and the motivations that drive their need to accept that definition at the cost of progress and enlightenment.