Textual Analysis on the book of The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler - Research Paper Example

Many critics claim that dystopian novels set in the future are not really about the author’s idea of the future, but instead are deliberately exaggerated stories about what the author thinks is wrong with the world of his or her present. With this in mind, it is easy to see that Butler was writing not about the year 2024, but about the year 1993. In The Parable of the Sower, it’s easy to see the fears and problems represented that were prevalent in American society in the early 1990s. Huge corporations exploiting increasingly powerless workers, an epidemic of crack addiction among the inner-city poor, race riots triggered by police brutality, and a new public discourse about rape dominated the news of the day.

Crime—particularly violent inner-city crime and gang-related crime—had been extremely high in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The change that the main character, Lauren, preaches about is really the change that Octavia Butler wished to see in her own society. The basis for the Earthseed philosophy that Lauren tries to spread is that the only god is change, and people can create the change they want to see if they understand that they are able to do it. The people who don’t know they can create change, or those who fear change, will eventually become victims of it.

In Lauren’s world, the problems of the late twentieth century United States have grown so severe that they make life essentially unlivable for impoverished people. Problems that were once thought of as only urban issues have moved out into rural areas. It’s the extreme nature of these problems that forces the change to happen. If Lauren had lived in a slightly safer or more stable situation; if she had been able to stay safely in her home, or if she’d had a loving family alive to keep her there, she would never have tried to travel north and gather followers for her new religion.

Instead she might have lived quietly and never shared her ideas with