Depictions of Religion, Family Power In Real Life By Octavia E. Butler.

Octavia E Butler incorporated a powerful and rich language in her novels. She created well-developed characters in which she tackled race, gender, religion, poverty, power, politics, and science. She introduced the exceptional and innovative examples of telepathy, dystopia, and time travel as well. For several years and the growing intensity of racial discrimination, she struggled to make a name in the writer’s community. However, she thrived as a female writer and signified the feelings of fear, pain, and apprehensions in African Americans during those hardships.

Unfortunately, she died at the age of 58, but her novels still make an impact today. In the case of her novel Parable of the Sower, the young character, Lauren Olamina grew up in a strict Baptist family and was baptized even though she doesn’t believe in her father’s religion. Her character gets interesting as she desires to start her own religion. Throughout the novel, Butler demonstrates the portrayals of religion, the strength of family, and the valuable resources of the earth.

As she begins to spread the influence of her own religion called “Earthseed” which means “God is changing.” “God is Change” is a way for adapting survival skills in short-term change and settling into different worlds for long-term change. This shows that in terms of the world-changing, we learn every day how to adapt and move on forward from the tragedies and horrible things in life.

Butler expresses that “Earthseed” can be a correlation with our own lives. Even though her father’s beliefs were not what aligned with hers, she still believes that God is a high power that helps humanity change and adopts ways of life regardless of what the situation is.

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Christ learned lessons throughout life. Although many were skeptical about his presence on earth, Christ understood the strength needed to survive life. He did that by loving, helping, and guiding others when they need it the most. Lauren wanted to incorporate the same ideas of that into her own without the rules being applied. In the world presented by Butler, everyone feels great pain. The life of each person is a struggle. They know great poverty, and they see suffering and death daily. This pain causes them to desire hope for a better life.

In this community, adults believe things will get better, but they don’t do anything to ensure that it does. They sit, wait, and idle. Lauren feels this pain and suffering for the people, and it is becoming harder for her to bear. Therefore, Lauren becomes more willing to do something about the pain to ensure her survival. She tries to influence others to do something about their pain and miserable life but her ideas stood rejected. Because of her hyper empathy syndrome, she couldn’t endure staying in the community. It became bad for her health so she prepared herself to leave, putting together a pack of necessities. She practiced the scenario of leaving in the middle of the night. When the time came, she was able to escape. Her strong desire to liberate herself from this agony saved her life.

Lauren is a perfect example of this argument. I believe that Butler portrays herself in Lauren’s character. I believe Butler wants to invent her own religion. It seems that she may have hyper empathy herself. She probably feels what Laurens feels. Having empathy and compassion is not easy for some people. People that have hyper empathy feel so much and it can be overwhelming. I think the character Lauren is like Butler. She wrote a character that can relate to her in real life. Lauren’s religion “Earthseed” is about change. Lauren is trying to adapt in this world that she lives in. The side of where she is living is a gated community.

They live in their own bubble and Lauren is seeking outside that bubble. She is looking for “Change in God.” In the book, the outside gated community is portrayed as being the bad world. The bad world consists of thieves and murderers. Lauren’s view on the outside world is that she wants to change it for the better with her religion. She can start her religion and spread the word of God. It’s similar in our world where Christianity was spread out in different cultures to introduce the word of God. Lauren’s “Earthseed” can be portrayed as a religion similar to that. She wants to live in a world of change, peace, and what’s wrong and right.

Butler had those thoughts in mind when she was writing this book. It’s interesting that she wrote a book about a girl having hyper empathy and that this girl wants to start her own religion. Hyper empathy is an interesting topic to write a character about. A character that has so much empathy and compassion for others is an overwhelming trait to have. In the world, that we live in we have people that want to help others and it’s good because we need people to feel what others feel. It’s like that saying where you put yourself in the other shoes. People want to relate because if you relate and you can empathize with them. Once you empathize, you have compassion and you can start to change.

Butler probably wanted to change the world. She probably thought her outside world was chaotic. Her book is about changing a world that needed to be changed because no one was brave enough to change it except one girl which is Lauren. As the story continued, Lauren did get followers as progressed in the story. In the story, she did meet other people like her. She meets an old man in the story and ended having a relationship with him. He had land and she decided to go with him to his land. As she gathered a following, she was on her way to building a religion. Without followers, there is no religion to start.

This promised land that the old man has is a new chapter in life. A building block of change. That’s what Butler wanted to portray in her story. As life progress, we have obstacles to go through but if we believe in something and have faith we can have changed. Change in something good. Something to look forward to. Butler wanted to end the story with Lauren having a new land and new followers to build on. It’s similar to Jesus’ story where he heard God’s word and God wanted him to spread his word. He got followers and the story is history.

Lauren is a writer, a thinker, and something of a religious prophet. That makes her something of an outsider, even over and above the outsider she already is as a minority female. She’s not in a particularly powerful or prestigious position. But as an outsider, she can really see things for what they are. We want to read what Lauren has to say because she knows what’s going on, and she understands how non-VIP individuals can make a lot of difference by telling the truth as they see it. The novel stands out because its was written at a time when the sci-fi genre was dominated by white men, without making a huge deal about it, Octavia E.

Butler wrote it sci-fi genre from her own perspective. An important issue in this novel is how well people know one another and when and how to trust people. Laurens struggles between her love for Curtis and her concern that he might not understand or accept both her hyper empathy and her Earthseed ideas. She also tells Harry Balter about her hyper empathy, and he worries that he can’t trust her because he feels like he doesn’t really know her. I would like for the readers to get from this novel “Parable of The Sower” for them to think about is that I hope people read Parable of the Sower will think about where we seem to be heading- we the United States, even we the human species. Where are we going, what sort of future are we creating, is it kind of future you want to live in if it isn’t, what can we do to create a better future, and Individually and in groups, what can we do. This was written because she exemplifies the strains on community, effort, and love or one woman.

The theme of community is central to the development of the main character’s sense of self-worth. Lauren, however, represents the womb needed to give birth to a new society-the mother to a new community. Lauren has two dreams she recounts. Lauren teaches herself to fly similar to her home and tries to avoid fire. She repeats a real-life conversation Lauren had with her stepmother. Throughout the novel, Lauren is the main character she told her perspective in the form of the diary entries, at the beginning of the book she was 15 and it was her birthday the last chapter she is 18 years old. She was raised in a gated community in Robledo, California. Lauren’s mother was a drug addict and Lauren was born with a neurological condition called hyperempathetic.

She experiences pleasure and pain and suffers those around her. Even such as Lauren’s father and her brother Keith consider hyper empathy to be shameful or liability, it showed a good and bad side. Compassion is difficult trait to have in Lauren’s world, where a moment’s hesitation can get someone killed, she has a great deal of compassion because of her hyper empathy. She feels pain because she felt it herself she knows how bad it felt on them because she had it on herself. Lauren’s old neighborhood was still divided by petty disagreements and arguments. Lauren seeks in Earthseed to build a community according to the truth that she noticed in the world. She realizes that life “God is Change”, that she would want people to adapt themselves to the truth. Community is immensely important in the novel because it is the only way to survive.

When Lauren was a young girl in a dystopian wasteland she struggles a lot with her gender impact. She was expected to learn how to handle guns and protect the community. It is also sensitive to the challenges that men face because of their gender. She was suspicious of Grayson Mora at first because she thinks he is untrustworthy. She realizes later on that he is a sharer, a hyper empathy like her, and showing emotions showing a hair tome with people’s pain. Weakness and Strength is not always straightforward as they may seem in a world dominated by violence. She also lives in a violent world and in this novel, it is filled with many disturbing descriptions of the horrors people commit against each other. In conclusion, I believe that Octavia Butler had written this story because I think it correlates to her own life and beliefs.

Lauren was a perfect example that best supports this because I feel that Octavia portrays herself to Lauren. In a journal article called An interview with Octavia E. Butler, she had stated that “writing is very personal.” Since she didn’t have much growing up she talked about how she was in between jobs trying to live but while in between jobs, she would also keep writing because it was what she loved doing. She states, “I felt like an animal, just living in order to live, just surviving. But as long as I wrote, I felt that I was living in order to do something more, something I actually cared about.” This is a perfect example of Butler portraying Lauren because Lauren believed that Earthseed was all about surviving in life. From Octavia’s perspective, writing was her survival technique. In reality, it is possible that writing to Octavia was like her Earthseed.