• Nilges, Mathias. ““We Need the Stars”: Change, Community, and the Absent Father in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Callaloo, vol. 32 no. 4, 2009, p. 1332-1352. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.0.0553.
  • This piece talks about the idea of “Fordism”, saying that rather than labeling Parable of the Sower as postmodern, but as post-Fordist instead. The author introduces the idea of Fordism as a mode of production that, for the very first time, invades, standardizes, and regulates every single aspect of someone’s life. Before mentioning this, however, the piece also discuses Butler’s concept of change.
• Blazan, Sladja. “”Something Beyond Pain”: Race, Gender, and Hyperempathy in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Gender Forum, no. 82, 2022, pp. 34. ProQuest, http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/something-beyond-pain-race-gender-hyperempathy/docview/2764532780/se-2.
  • This piece talks mostly talks about Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of Parable of the Sower, and her hyperempathy. Specifically, how Butler’s idea of feminist reconsiderations of empathy raises questions about “failures” in the collective consciousness and demonstrate how speculative fiction can address the violence of liberal conceptions under radical capitalism.
• Allen, Marlene D. “Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels and the “Boomerang” of African American History.” Callaloo, vol. 32 no. 4, 2009, p. 1353-1365. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.0.0541.
  • This piece makes note to tell it’s audience that Butler’s tales teach her readers about life lessons, human history, and, in the words of the article, many pitfalls that continually seem to ensnare the human species. It also mentions how Butler insistently incorporates identifiable African American histories within her writings, regardless of the fact that her pieces may either be set in the future or on entirely different planets, and that she uses the creative possibilities within science fiction to portray African American history in completely new and original ways.
• Dubey, Madhu. “Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women’s Fiction: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 27 no. 1, 1999, p. 103-128. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1999.0017.
  • In this piece, it mentions that Parable of the Sower exposes the hollowness and duplicity of recent (within the period this piece was written in) American ideologies or urban development, using the story’s uncannily possible future to point out that America has become, in the words of the piece, a “consumption artifact” that has fallen to a unstable urban order founded on economic and racial inequalities.
• Theiss, Derek. “Care Work, Age, and Culture in Butler’s Parable Series.” Femspec, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 63-99,208. ProQuest, http://proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/care-work-age-culture-butlers-parable-series/docview/1726394732/se-2.
  • This piece talks about age and class, specifically Lauren’s age when she founded her community, and that these differently aged relationships in this community are a mark of diversity, which is a social imperative during the times of Parable of the Sower. It also brings up Earthseed, the religion that Lauren found, and how it’s motto “God is Change” opens, in the words of the piece, critical, fluid, and anti-realist spaces for challenging problematic issues of race and class.

• Nilges, Mathias. ““We Need the Stars”: Change, Community, and the Absent Father in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Callaloo, vol. 32 no. 4, 2009, p. 1332-1352. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.0.0553.
• Drzata, Elijah (2019) “Gender in Dystopia: The Persistence of Essentialist Ideologies in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal: Vol. 11: Iss. 1, Article 3. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/urj/vol11/iss1/3
• Allen, Marlene D. “Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels and the “Boomerang” of African American History.” Callaloo, vol. 32 no. 4, 2009, p. 1353-1365. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.0.0541.
• Dubey, Madhu. “Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women’s Fiction: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 27 no. 1, 1999, p. 103-128. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1999.0017.
• Phillips, Jerry. “The Intuition of the Future: Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 35, no. 2/3, 2002, pp. 299–311. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1346188.

Ben Lerner’s novel “10:04”, is definitely not an easy read. I find it difficult to get into the flow of the novel, and whatever was happening in the novel wasn’t really sticking with me. It’s terribly confusing to read, and the pictures (in my opinion) weren’t helping much. I’m not much of a reader in general, and if I don’t like something I’m quick to put it down and never touch it again… However, I don’t have a choice but to read this book, so here I am. 

Even though I’m from New York, I’m not really from New York (to put it simply, I’m from Staten Island), so whatever NYC-esque thing that is being talked about or whatever location is said, I have absolutely no idea what the narrator is talking about. I’m being serious. My NYC lifestyle consists of me traveling 1hr and a half by bus twice a week from Staten Island to Manhattan, staying within the area of Hunter College (Midtown), and then traveling back home for another ~2 hours. So I don’t know anything about a “High-Line” or “Chelsea”, which already makes this book unrelatable to me. Though, the narrator (who is actually the author of the novel) also spoke briefly all the way in the beginning about eating “outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.” (Lerner, 3?) Which, again, is unrelatable. However, the relatability of this novel is unimportant right now.

From what I’ve gotten from this novel, this novel is about “time”. I say this because Ben brings it up a few times in the beginning of the novel (first chapter), to make us understand the importance of time and its prevalence within the novel. We also discover that the narrator has a chronic heart illness that could result in death. I feel like that fact that the two concepts (time and his illness) were mentioned so soon probably means that the author wants us to be able to connect some dots–maybe along the lines of the narrator feeling the pressure of time, not knowing how long he may have left, but regardless, still wanting to focus on writing his novel. The novel makes references to “Back to the Future”, and even has a moment between Ben and Alex that makes us think about time as well, when Alex talks about getting pregnant with his child and Ben thinking about fatherhood. In the essence of time, will Ben even survive long enough to experience fatherhood?

How does Octavia Butler challenge traditional gender roles, based on our understanding of gender dynamics and power structures in typical dystopian settings, in her novel Parable of the Sower?

This blog post, once again written in honesty, doesn’t have much of a general direction besides the fact that I would like to discuss my thoughts on the ending of the novel, as well as my general thoughts of the novel as a whole.

That’s to say, I’ll discuss the novel in general first—it was… interesting, and I don’t mean that as in “I found this book interesting!!” Quite the opposite in fact. I understand the backstory of this novel, as it was based on real events, but the way it was written was more complex than it needed to be in my honest opinion. Having two narrators in a novel is fine, but I think Ghosh’s delivery in terms of time was lacking. It was difficult to determine what was happening as there weren’t any clear signs as to a time skip in the backwards direction, like when we read about Kanai and Fokir’s mom (Kusum??) when they were younger. It felt like events were just… happening.

There were a few places in the novel that had journal entries or like, stories in them, and I just want to be completely honest and say that I was not interested in the journal entries/stories at all. Like all the way at the start of the novel at the end of the first chapter (then again, the chapters aren’t entirely clear either), there’s an entire page and a half’s worth of words that didn’t really catch my attention enough for me to find it important to read. I get maybe for the story, these were important, but they certainly don’t need to be almost two pages long. Ghosh could’ve probably used those extra pages to write a clearer ending.

I’m fine with the characters, I think they were written alright. I feel like Piya could have more of a personality, but then again she isn’t able to properly communicate with others because she doesn’t know the language, so I find it a bit understandable that she isn’t very talkative and that she seems to be absent of a personality or some expressiveness. Kanai, on the other hand, I think was pretty interesting to read, only because he has what Piya lacks—the ability to communicate, so we’re able to see Kanai interact with others and react to situations. The best example I can think of would be when Fokir and Kanai were going through the jungle and Kanai fell down in the mud after being tripped up from a “rope-like tendril”. Fokir offers to help him, but instead Kanai yells at him, “‘Ja, shuorer bachcha, beriye ja! Get away from me, you son of a pig!’” (Ghosh, 277) Kanai in this scene is very expressive, showing the emotion of anger through his words and tone of voice. During this point in the novel though, I would say that Piya had definitely become more talkative and expressive, which was nice to see considering that I like her character quite a bit—mainly because she works closely with sea animals and loves her job.

Now for the ending, I would say was a bit of a let down. I mean, content wise it was fine because Piya and Nilima sorted out Piya’s project idea, where it would also help benefit Monya and her son because she’ll get a part-time job and learn some English from Piya (who would learn Bangla in turn). However, considering what happened in the novel, I was sort of expecting there’d be some sort of romance between Piya and Kanai, where we’d get some sort of closure on their relationship, but no. Kanai wasn’t even there at the very very end of the novel, he was in another location on his way back to Lusibari (I think it was? I can’t find it at the time of writing) while Piya was having a chat with Nilima. I wish we even got more information on Piya’s project and maybe information on how it was going after a time skip, as well as checking up on Piya and Kanai’s relationship. But instead, it felt like a really annoying cliffhanger.