Kevin's Most Important Trait

I think that Kevin is the most interesting character in Kindred.  He tends to say things that make the difference in race between him and Dana very uncomfortable.  However, he also seems to be the one character in this book who can completely ignore the race of whoever he interacts with, and as a result of that has trouble seeing that race does matter to many people.  After finding out that Kevin is Dana's husband, Sarah says,

“Your husband … he’d get in trouble every now and then ’cause he couldn’t tell the difference ’tween black and white.”

Despite the irrelevance of race in society being, I think, a major goal of racial equality, it seems that this is not  a desirable characteristic in Kevin, a white man married to a black woman.  When he talks to Dana after they see slave children playing a game resembling a slave auction, Kevin minimizes the horror of slavery, sounding similar to how I think someone arguing the paternalism side to slavery would

"This place isn't what I would have imagined. No overseer. No more work than the people can manage ..."

While the things he says are somewhat true, he temporarily overlooks the slew of reasons that slavery, even at this relatively good plantation, is a terrible thing.  Dana instantly reminds him of these reasons.  Although I don't think Kevin actually believes slavery is acceptable in any way, remarks like this are what make his sense of race seem flawed.

It could be said that the friction that arises because of his "colorblindness" is because society is not colorblind as a whole in 1976, and certainly not in the antebellum south.  But, for a society to become colorblind as a whole I think that this disregard of race needs to start with someone and then spread.  If that is true, then perhaps Kevin's awkward remarks should be taken not as something to be looked down upon, but rather as a sign of one of the best parts of his character: the ability to completely ignore race.

135,000

As was brought up during the panel presentations today, there is still a lot of uncertainty regarding the dresden bombings and the exact number of people killed.  I did a bit of research and found that there was recently a German historical study of the bombing, partly as a response to the use of this event in far-right radical propaganda.  The results were published in this book, although it is written in German.  From reading the summary given online it seems to be a very thorough and scientific study, which I think presents the most accurate numbers on Dresden.  These numbers are at least 22,700 dead, 20,000 of which can be listed by name.  The upper estimate is no more than 25,000.

Vonnegut's source for his 135,000 figure was The Destruction of Dresden by David Irving.  Vonnegut did not know at the time that this source was far from an accurate history.  It is now widely known that David Irving is a holocaust denier and deliberately misrepresented history in order to downplay Nazi atrocities and exaggerate allied ones.  In writing this "history," Irving used a falsified document created as Nazi propaganda as his main source, and it was from this document that he got his number of 135,000.  It is a shame that Vonnegut was influenced by such a terribly inaccurate historical source.  

In All This Happened, More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden by Ann Rigney, the article we discuss in our panel presentation, the author argues that Irving's book had a greater impact on Vonnegut and Slaughter House Five than just the number it gave. In the opening pages of his book, Vonnegut writes "It wasn’t a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima." This comparison to Hiroshima apparently stems directly from Irving's book, and, through the popularity of Slaughter House Five has been brought into the popular perception of these two bombings.  Vonnegut's unintentional propagation of these misleading figures and arguments are very misfortunate and in the eyes of some take away from the powerful anti-war message of this book.  I think that just because Vonnegut got his numbers wrong and (mistakenly) said that one WWII bombing was worse than another does not reduce the power of this book's message.  His denunciation of war in general is completely unaffected by the details about which bombing in war claimed more lives.