48 pages • 1 hour read
Bloodchild and Other Stories
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Character Analysis
Gan
Gan, the protagonist of “Bloodchild,” is the adolescent son of his mother, Lien, and an unnamed, deceased father. Gan and his family live on a Terran (human) preserve on an alien planet that humans have fled to after a disaster on Earth. Because the story is told from his point of view on what he calls his last night of childhood, the reader is privy to Gan’s coming to maturity both physically and emotionally as his relationship with the Tlic, the planet’s alien natives, changes, when he witnesses a Tlic birth gone wrong.
Gan has known from birth that he was being groomed to be his family’s human host, or N’Tlic, for an important female Tlic official named T’Gatoi. Because of this, Gan has received special treatment throughout the years, including more of the restorative unfertilized Tlic eggs, as well as being spared from hunting, farming and other forms of manual hard work. As a result, he is described as physically delicate, with soft hands, as well as extremely trusting of the Tlic and, in particular, T’Gatoi, with whom he has an especially close relationship, as evidenced by his defending her to his older brother, Qin, as well as his physical contact with her. Gan initially believes it is a great honor to be chosen to be N’Tlic but is horrified when he accidentally witnesses a Tlic brood burrowing out of a human. Gan becomes ambivalent toward the Tlic, wondering if T’Gatoi truly loves him and believes he’s special, or if she’s just using him as a breeding animal. Torn between loyalty to the Tlic and to humanity, he nearly shoots T’Gatoi, but he ultimately spares her, though it is initially not clear if he did this out of love for her or for his younger sister, who T’Gatoi threatens to impregnate in his stead.
Gan consents to being impregnated by T’Gatoi, signaling his becoming an adult through sexual maturity as he also become an adult mentally earlier in the night, when his childlike naiveté and implicit trust in the Tlic was shattered by the violence of Bram Lomas’ experience. With the exception of Gan, all of the other protagonists in this collection are female. Though other characters take on behaviors and emotions not typically associated with their assigned gender, Gan literally takes on the characteristics of a woman. Thus, while Gan is not literally a woman, his affect and experiences are stereotypically female, and thus Butler uses Gan to explore what it means to be a woman and what it might look like if roles were reversed or transposed. In addition to experiencing the traditionally-female act of giving birth, Gan is also more compassionate and loving toward the Tlic in general than the rest of his family, a characteristic usually associated with femininity. It is implied he will have maternal love for the Tlic grubs he will bear. This allows him to cultivate a quasi-romantic relationship with T’Gatoi, becoming completely vulnerable to the female alien through his love for her. Their relationship shows the possibility of a human-alien relationship based on mutual love and respect.
Noah Cannon
Noah Cannon is another Butlerian character who is an amalgamation of traditional gender roles and traits. Noah is a mid-30s black woman who has been imprisoned and experimented on by the stranger-Communities, a race of amorphous aliens who have come to Earth to coexist with humanity. Written with the painful history of African-American chattel slavery in mind, Noah represents the rebirth of a people after a history of pain and suffering.
When Noah meets the six human recruits, they initially only refer to her as “Translator,” but after one of them remembers running across her name in the news and thinking how strange it was to have a woman named Noah, they realize who she is. Noah was the among the second wave of human captives taken by the Communities. She grew up in the Mojave Desert Bubble and witnessed the Communities’ shift from experimenting on humans to finding out more about them to establishing a language with them. Noah was the first human to return to the Communities and work for them after being freed.
“Noah” is also a reference to the biblical figure who was tasked by God with building an arc to save his family, as well as the Earth’s animal species, after a great flood wiped out the rest of the world. While the biblical Noah saves his blood relations, Noah Cannon is less overtly sentimental and more pragmatic; she chooses to leave her human home and family in order to go work for the aliens. She does this partly out of a kinship with all of humanity, as she is aware of the stakes of working together with the aliens. However, Noah also feels a genuine kinship with the Communities, as evidenced by her close relationship with her employer, as well as her disillusionment with humanity after she was picked up by the government.
Valerie Rye
The protagonist of “Speech Sounds,” Rye is an early-middle-aged widow who lost her husband and children to the mysterious disease that ravaged the world and left most people without the ability to read, write or otherwise communicate consistently. Rye has been hardened by her family’s deaths, as well as through trying to survive as a single black woman in a violent new world. Though she is cautious, getting off the bus when a fight breaks out, her loneliness and need for human contact outweighs her caution and she gets into Obsidian’s car. She implores Obsidian to come live with her for companionship and protection, indicating Rye has not completely embraced the dog-eat-dog mentality of the new world. She remains appalled by the violence and crudeness of the populace and is one of the few who retains enough compassion to help the woman who is being attacked in front of her.
Rye’s empathy is directly tied to her acute loneliness, as well as her relationship to modes of communication. Not only did she lose her family, but she lost her entire former identity of being a history professor, a livelihood that relied on reading and writing. In the new world, this emphasis on language arts has been transformed into compassion and is Rye’s form of connecting with others. This is also at work in her protective instincts towards the two orphans she ends up taking home. She takes them in not only out of maternal desire but also because she still maintains some complex-reasoning skills: Rye understands how important these particular children are for the good of the entire world, since they seem to have been unaffected by the disease. At the end of the story, her kinship with the children manifests in her speaking her name out loud to them for the first time in three years.
Martha Bes
Martha describes herself as a poor, black girl who grew up to become a professional author. Martha has this in common with Butler herself, and we can see many similarities in their persistent relationship to writing and the investment in identifying as an author. Martha’s name also alludes to the biblical character, who was Mary Magdalene and Lazarus’s sister in the Bible. Martha was associated with being a good hostess and taking care of the home, and, in contrast to her sister, Martha was less impulsive, more introspective, and much less well-known.
At first, Martha suffers from low self-esteem, as she wonders why God chose her, and pictures God as a white man powerfully lording over her. Later, as she begins to find power in herself as an author and a black woman, God changes to mirror this shift in consciousness. This newfound self-confidence allows Martha to make the ultimate sacrifice of her position as a writer in order to fulfill the task God gives her. However, Martha recognizes that her changed perspective does not mean the world will recognize her accordingly.
As an author, Martha was accorded some manner of fame and recognition, but now she must give that up. Martha spends the story deciding what is important in human nature so she can make a change without ruining the integrity of humanity. In doing so, she must give up her own nature. Like the biblical Martha, this Martha resigns herself to being relatively unknown.
Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler was a California native born in 1947. By the time of her death at age 58, she had earned numerous prizes for her science fiction novels and short stories, including becoming the first science fiction author to receive a prestigious Macarthur Fellowship. Butler often uses experiences, places and protagonists influenced by her own life, as most of the heroes she writes are African-American women who must navigate racial and gender hierarchies in addition to other struggles. Because of this, some critics have associated her with Afrofuturism, which generally uses speculative fiction to explore themes of African-American identity and culture in a techno-scientific context. However, Butler’s themes exceed kinship with one’s own nationality, ethnicity, or even species. She is often concerned with themes of hybridity and cross-species relationships as a means of survival in the face of disaster. Butler takes the African-American history of slavery and forced miscegenation and reconfigures it in the light of genuine love and friendship between humans, aliens and other non-human communities.
In this story collection, her work often asks whether it is possible to create new relationships in light of the unknown, even in the face of violence and backlash. The two first-person essays she contributes to the updated publication of the collection detail some of the obstacles she had to overcome in order to become a successful author. The essays also show how important Butler believes it is to have mentorship and role models that young authors can look up to. She remarks that as a child, there were hardly any black authors, and only one black science-fiction author that Butler had heard of. Perhaps this is part of the reason that one of her recurring themes is the black, female survivor turned heroine. This mode of character rises to help not only herself but often plays a pivotal role in remarking the world as a more egalitarian place. Butler has a lot in common with her protagonists’ persistence, as well as their ability to imagine alternative futures and then work to make these come true.
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By Octavia E. Butler
