Literary Criticism 

Octavia Butler’s book Dawn highlights the social challenges faced by women who have to navigate oppressive systems. Lilith, the main character, is awoken in a world where actual rebellion seems to be impossible, yet she still finds a way to resist through her own survival, voice, and adding of her own opinions, whilst being kept on 24 hour surveillance by an alien race. Her own choice to live becomes a feminist act within itself, reframing all the things she has to endure into protest instead of passive compliance. By doing so, Butler demonstrates that resistance can be seen in mutiple forms : refusing to be silenced, maintaining identity, and educating others. This point tends to resonate with readers by planting the seed that everyday acts are very powerful tools to fight oppression. 

Another key feature of Octavia Butler’s style within Dawn is her honest tone. In the book Butler uses certain words to aid in conveying emotions to the reader as well as certain events. Butler is extremely blunt in the way she gets readers to feel. In doing so Butler uses the tone to invoke a reader's thought process to think as if they were Lilith. Critics often suggest that this often leads the reader to recognize the hopelessness within the story, and promote change within the real world. This is all achieved by Butler’s honest tone.  

Henceforth, in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, every single character has to deal with an unusual social climate, yet even with all of the change that happened women experience violence and oppression a much greater amount. “By creating a dystopian world in which violence unequally affects women, especially women of lower socioeconomic status, Butler offers through Lauren’s narration a pessimistic view of how other women react to these injustices.”(Gartner 2) When Lauren faces the challenge of losing her home, and having to run away, she cross-dresses as a man to avoid sexual violence and to emit a more feared persona. When Butler includes this in the book she does not want the reader to see it as a solution to sexual violence, but more as what Gartner stated “a call to action.”

In Parable of the Sower,  Octavia Butler provides Lauren with a heightened sense of empathy,  “Hyper empathy”, that is unavoidable and acts as a shaping force through all of her decisions. Her hyper empathy quickly becomes the start of a philosophy to resist violence and deal with trauma. Teaching anyone that follows that “kindness eases Change”. In doing so Lauren created a new religion rooted with unity and compassion for others, that was also outside any kind of male hierarchy. Consequently, Butler rewrites the narrative of Lauren's disability into a positive ability, making her a terrific leader who uses empathy as knowledge and power.

Octavia Butler grew up facing enormous challenges. Consequently every one of her writings reflect “ an unbending will, muted ferocity, and clear eyed pessimism” that molded her prophetic literature. Using her own experiences as an African American woman, she always hit the nail on the head when portraying struggles. Within her books she often discussed serious historical tragedies, like slavery in Kindred. Furthermore, Butler made these intense ideas more accessible through speculative fiction, widening the audience that wouldn’t engage with these topics otherwise. Her novels almost always touched on the tension related between oppression and survival.

As a Black woman who started writing speculative fiction in the 1970s and 80s, Butler had many firsthand instances of overcoming challenges while going through her publishing journey. She used this as motivation to blossom. Butler then started using science fiction to bring a light to the shallow models of what people back then called “American History” ,and to be the driving force for readers to imagine new better futures that were fully capable of being achieved. Ultimately, Octavia Butler has had a massive impact on how African American culture has been able to flourish and left an everlasting belief that her writing was ages ahead of her own time.

Octavia Butler was almost exclusively known for including themes that involved futuristic post-human conditions within society. These are always intertwined with a deep rooted conflict that enhances commentary. Also another very common idea within her writings was power within numbers, whether this be through Parable of the Sower and Lauren’s group of three that grew throughout the novel or Dawn  and Lilith's pod of surviving humans whom she must train to survive back on earth.  Nonetheless, she is also praised for her excellent use of traumatic imagery to build emotion in a story. Butler’s depictions of characters' struggles never goes without purpose, instead they are placed to magnify the resilience of her characters or the moral quorum they must overcome. 

Additionally, Butler’s commentary insists that without acknowledging the past legacies of societal problems, a new future cannot be imagined.