48 pages • 1 hour read
Octavia E. ButlerBloodchild and Other Stories
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Bloodchild”-“Near of Kin”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story Summary: “Bloodchild”
The story opens with the narrator, an adolescent boy named Gan, describing an evening at home with his mother, brother and sisters on what he calls his last night of childhood. A strange visitor, T’Gatoi, has come over to give his family several eggs. The eggs prolong life and promote health, but Gan notices his mother won’t have any. The eggs lull the family into a peaceful, drug-like state, and the narrator states that he gets one egg all to himself to eat. He is close to T’Gatoi, apparently laying flush against her as he sips the liquid from his egg. He feels closely-bonded to her, and enjoys being her favorite, though he doesn’t know why. T’Gatoi is a government official: “It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying” (2).
Humans, called Terrans, live on a preserve on the alien planet with the Tlic, the planet’s natives. Humans are farmed out to the needy or given to the wealthy for breeding by T’Gatoi’s political party: “Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people” (3). The Tlic are a race of insect-like humanoids with segmented bodies and many limbs, who live many times longer than humans. In order to breed, however, they need hosts for their eggs. The Tlic are refugees from an unknown disaster. Before humans came to their planet, they used other large mammals but came to prefer the humans. Now, in exchange for the safety of the preserve, the Tlic reserve the right to choose a boy from each family to be the host for their eggs. A human who’s chosen for this role is called an N’Tlic. Gan describes how the Tlic used to treat humans as non-sentient mammals and would pen them together in groups and drug them with eggs in order to get them to mate. Gan’s mother, Lien, has apparently stopped being friendly with T’Gatoi, though Gan recalls a time before when they were good friends, and his mother ate her share of eggs. T’Gatoi even introduced Lien to her now-deceased husband.
The night is interrupted when a man named Bram Lomas, an N’Tlic, wanders into the yard. He’s been separated from his Tlic, T'Khotgif Teh, just as the alien babies are about to hatch. T’Gatoi attempts to comfort and save him as best she can. T’Gatoi tells Gan to go slaughter a large animal. Gan describes how he has never done this before. As a consequence of being coddled by T’Gatoi and raised as a prized Terran, for breeding, Gan has not had to learn the life skills his other siblings have, and he’s even grown to identify with and love the Tlic and grow dependent on their material comforts and favoritism. He believes the Tlic genuinely love him in return. Gan describes shooting a local animal, an achti, even though guns are forbidden on the preserve, supposedly for the Terrans’ own good.
The Tlic are born when their eggs are injected into a host. They then grow in groups within the host until they are ready to hatch. If left alone, the grubs will burrow out of the host, killing them. Gan watches as T’Gatoi cuts Lomas open with what seems to be detached and surgical precision. Though Gan has been told about this all his life, witnessing it in person makes him disgusted and afraid of the process. He begins to wonder about T’Gatoi’s detachment, her seeming eagerness at the smell and taste of Lomas’ blood, and her indifference to his pain.
Gan’s brother, Qui, returns with T'Khotgif Teh. Gan and Qui used to be close, but now Qui stays away from the Tlic, though he always eats his share of egg. He also seems to despise Gan. He taunts Gan for finally seeing what he’s in for, and claims that when he was little, he saw a Tlic sacrifice her pregnant N’Tlic so that her grubs would have something to eat when they hatched. That’s when Qui began trying to escape the preserve, though he knows it’s futile. Gan reassures him that if Gan were to die, T’Gatoi would take his sister, not Qui. Though Tlic prefer Terran females as hosts, because they have more body fat, they tend to leave them alone so they don’t compromise the family’s ability to have their own children. Qui claims this is solely out of interest in preserving their host animals, to which Gan weakly objects, but it is clear seeing what happened to Lomas has deeply unsettled his belief in the mutuality and respect of the Terran-Tlic relationship. Gan and Qui fight, and the older Qui hits and overpowers Gan and knocks the latter unconscious.
When Gan comes to, it is dark. He makes his way back to the house. T’Gatoi enters and they discuss Lomas’s fate (he has survived). T’Gatoi claims nobody will ask Lomas to bear another brood. Gan says that nobody ever asked him whether he wanted to. Gan asks T’Gatoi what humans are to the Tlic and T’Gatoi reassures him that their relationship is special. She wants him to choose to be her N’Tlic and to be implanted willingly. T’Gatoi describes the history of the Terrans and the Tlic: that they used to use other animals that would kill their young, and when humans arrived, they wanted a peaceful and mutually-beneficial relationship, even when, as she claims, the humans saw the Tlic as nothing but “worms.” When this doesn’t work, T’Gatoi threatens to go to Gan’s sister instead. Gan contemplates hiding behind his sister and even threatens to commit suicide, but ultimately his love for his sister compels him to call T’Gatoi back and he reticently agrees to bear the eggs, asking T’Gatoi to allow the family to keep the forbidden firearm, as they might need to use it to save his life one day. Gan claims that if theirs is truly a partnership, and humans are not merely host animals, both parties have to accept some risk. T’Gatoi agrees, though reluctantly. Gan undresses and T’Gatoi implants an egg in him, first using an anesthetizing sting, then probing him with a tube-like appendage to deposit the egg. Afterward, the two hold each other and they discuss Gan’s feelings for T’Gatoi: whether he came to her out of genuine love for her, or fear for his sister, and whether he would have shot T’Gatoi with the gun. Despite himself, Gan feels possessive of T’Gatoi. As the story ends, T’Gatoi reassures him that he was the one she wanted to share this with all along, and that she’ll always be there to take care of him.
Story Summary: “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”
In this first-person narrative, University of Southern California student Lynn Mortimer begins by recalling her childhood, including a suicide attempt at age fifteen, as well as the deaths of her parents. Her father murdered her mother and then killed himself while Lynn was away at school. They are part of a group of people hidden by the government who are carriers of Duryea-Gode Disease. Lynn herself is in college on a scholarship for DGD students. Later in the story, DGD is revealed to be a side effect of being treated with Hedeonco, a pharmaceutical that was invented during a brief attempt to cure all the world’s major diseases, but instead people who were treated with it produced children with DGD.
DGD is characterized as a disease that promotes murder, cannibalism and other physically-destructive behaviors in patients. It is akin to being slowly turned into a zombie from the inside-out. The narrator says that patients often feel themselves beginning to “drift,” a mental detachment where patients go off into their own worlds. Drifting is often an early indicator that the disease has begun to manifest, and most sufferers then succumb to the behavior of the disease. However, as in the case of Lynn’s father, it can also strike suddenly and without warning. It often manifests in middle age, and many carriers do not live past their forties.
People with the disease are marked by an emblem they have to wear, like a medical alert bracelet, and cannot eat the same food or take the same medicine as non-carriers, and so must adhere to a special diet that curbs its influence. Because of her status as a carrier, Lynn is extremely alienated, as people with DGD are often social pariahs because of the stigma associated with the gruesome effects of the disease. She rents a house with other DGD students and soon a Nigerian student named Alan Chi moves in. Alan’s parents were both DGD carriers. She tells Alan about how her father died, and they discuss abortion and sterilization. Alan reveals that he had himself sterilized, which horrifies Lynn: “That would be like killing part of yourself—even though it wasn’t a part you intended to use. Killing part of yourself when so much of you was already dead” (75).
Alan and Lynn begin a sexual relationship, eventually becoming engaged. Lynn’s presence seems to motivate the sullen Alan out of his bitterness and depression. It also motivates him to look for his estranged mother, who is at a DGD camp called Dilg, a place for DGDs to go where they are looked after and attempt to ease their symptoms and the progression of the disease. Dilg is the first DGD camp run by patients. Alan claims that the Dilg ward has some sort of treatment, and he and Lynn decide to go to the ward to see Alan’s mother.
They arrive at the massive Dilg compound, which is on an old estate, and meet Beatrice, one of the doctors there. Because most of the staff at the ward are usually carriers themselves, Beatrice startles them because she appears to be in her sixties, and most carriers do not live that long. Lynn finds herself distrustful and disliking of Beatrice, though she can’t tell why. Lynn thinks that Beatrice seems to be hiding something. As they move through the ward, Lynn describes her previous experience at a DGD ward, where she saw a woman mutilate and cannibalize herself. Lynn describes DGD sufferers as “trapped in something [they] needed to dig [their] way out of” (95), but Beatrice insists that their single-minded focus can be channeled into creative pursuits. The estate is full of art and other inventions that the patients create. True to form, as they walk around the ward, toward Alan’s mother, they see DGD patients concentrating on painting, sculpting, drawing and working with wood and other tools.
They see Alan’s mother, Naomi, sculpting. She is blind, and her face is badly scarred from self-mutilation. After Beatrice explains that they can speak to Naomi, but it would mean disrupting her routine and they would have to stay and calm her down, Alan tells Naomi he’s her son and she touches his face. He then introduces Lynn, who finds herself inexplicably drawn to Naomi. Naomi demands new clay and begins to sculpt Alan and Lynn, though her destructive impulses begin to surface and have to be curbed multiple times by a sharp “No!” It isn’t typical for DGD patients to stop their behavior, though Lynn recalls that the woman she saw in the DGD ward did listen to her cry to stop harming herself, which makes Alan wonder if DGD patients only listen to women.
Beatrice explains that DGDs listen to certain female carriers, like herself and Lynn, who are daughters of two DGD parents, because they produce the most of a particular pheromone that is able to exert chemical influence over DGD patients. The scent can coax them out of their intense concentration and exert limited control over them. It is also why females who have it don’t get along well with others like them; thus, Beatrice and Lynn dislike each other. Beatrice tells Lynn it is the reason she was offered the Dilg scholarship, and that she can have a lucrative career at the Dilg center if she wants to. She also asks Alan to come work for them, but Alan is repelled and angry, accusing her of controlling him like a queen bee controls worker drones. He attempts to leave while Beatrice assures him that DGD patients retain their individuality and are not under coercion or control. She likens the scent to the trust and reliance somebody would give to a guide dog.
Alan and Lynn leave. Lynn decides to accept the offer, while Alan still has to consider it. Before the couple leaves, Lynn confides in Beatrice that she believes Beatrice already won him over, while Beatrice claims that sort of control is up to Lynn. As they drive away, Lynn contemplates her future at the ward: “For long, irrational minutes, I was convinced that somehow if I turned, I would see myself standing there, gray and old, growing small in the distance, vanishing” (117).
Story Summary: “Near of Kin”
This brief story is set in the present and told in the first person by the story’s female narrator. She and her uncle, Stephen, are at her deceased mother’s house. Her widowed mother, Barbara, left the narrator to be taken care of by her grandmother when she was younger. Though she visited occasionally, the narrator always felt her mother was aloof and didn’t want a child. Her uncle was the only other family member to take more than a passing interest in her.
As they are going to through her late mother’s things, her aunt shows up to take a few things and then leaves. The narrator is surprised to find that her seemingly poor mother had property in Arizona and Oregon and left behind a will. She is resentful of her mother for leaving and neglecting her and confides this to her uncle.
Both the uncle and narrator are described as short, with slight, delicate features that run in the family and resulted in the other male family members constantly feeling like they had to prove their masculinity. The narrator looks just like her uncle; they are even the same height, and it’s revealed that her uncle is actually her father, which is part of the reason her mother couldn’t bear to stay and raise her.
Stephen explains that they were always close and that he loved her and would have married her, but the narrator still believes that her mother only had a child to “to prove she was woman enough to have one ”(138). They discuss whether Barbara should have stayed and raised her or if it was better to have told her the truth and to have faced possible rejection. The narrator believes she would have accepted the reality, but Stephen remarks that her mother couldn’t take that chance. The story ends with the Stephen urging the narrator to take the money her mother left and use it to pay for college. Her seeming acceptance of the money simultaneously is indicative of coming to peace with her mother’s abandonment and the truth of her parentage.
In the Afterword, Butler explains the story was inspired by her fascination with incestuous relationships in the Bible.
Analysis: “Bloodchild”-“Near of Kin”
Though these three stories appear completely distinct from one another with regards to their plot, characters and setting, all three stories introduce questions about the nature of family, survival and personal identity. “Bloodchild” tells the story of the teenaged boy Gan, who lives on an alien planet with his family and other humans. When the story begins, humans have already been co-inhabiting the planet with the aliens (the Tlic) for several generations. Humans were initially hostile to the Tlic, as T’Gatoi reminds Gan when she remarks that humans used to refer to the Tlic as “worms,” a derogatory reference to their centipede-like appearance and kinship with insects.
The themes of human egoism and fear of the unknown are displayed in the association of the technologically- and physically-superior Tlic with worms, which most humans would consider inferior. Butler uses the question of getting along with different species in this story as a way to explore how different family groups and communities are created, and how identity is formed: does Gan consider himself a human, and thus a being whose interests are separate from the Tlic, or, because he’s participating in a symbiotic birth with T’Gatoi, can we consider him a hybrid of human and alien? The N’Tlic, those humans who are surrogate hosts for the Tlic broods, are a bridge between two seemingly-opposed communities.
The Tlic cannot reproduce without a host species, while the humans cannot survive on the planet without the support of the Tlic, and thus both groups must overcome their respective differences in order to survive.
Like the humans in “Bloodchild,” who have fled Earth because of a human-caused catastrophe, the characters in “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” also vacillate between self-destructive and survivalist impulses. This story, like “Bloodchild,” is concerned with reproduction and the rebuilding of society after a disaster. In this story, the disaster is the Duryea-Gode Disease (DGD), which causes patients to literally destroy their bodies and withdraw mentally from the world. DGD patients like Lynn are ostracized socially because they are different from normal humanity. Like Gan, who is rejected by his brother, Qui, for appearing to side with the Tlic, DGD sufferers exist between pure humanity and something other. Thus, the disease manifests as a literal alienation of the patients from themselves.
In the story’s Afterword, Butler describes her interest in genetics, which fueled this story. She queries how much our biology dictates who we are, and what we do. DGD was created from elements of three real, inherited diseases, as well as Butler’s own invention of an illness that makes the sufferer feel as if their flesh is a prison they are trapped in. This last idea is taken from a notion familiar throughout the history of world philosophy and religion, found in the dialogues of Greek philosopher Plato as well as the meditations of Rene Descartes, father of modern philosophy: the body and the spirit/mind are separate, and the body is a prison for the spirit. Each of these ideas— the question of genetics, biological destiny, the mind and the body— invites the reader to ask what really makes a person who they are, and how they know who they are. In the end of both stories, Gan and Lynn respectively embrace their social and biological destinies by agreeing to risk their own physical and emotional wellbeing in order to create a better world for humans and non-humans alike.
“Near of Kin,” the shortest of the three stories, does not overtly deal with alien invasion or biological catastrophe, yet it still looks at questions of identity, biology and family, and arrives at the individual’s ability to transcend merely-inherited kinship or biology in order to create their own community. The story follows an unnamed female narrator as she wrestles with feelings of being abandoned in childhood by her mother. These feelings are stirred up because the story takes place while she is going through her mother’s things, after the latter has passed away. As a child, the narrator was shuffled between family members and thus never felt fully loved or accepted, except by her uncle Stephen, her mother’s brother, who also arrives at her mother’s house. The revelation that Stephen is actually her father, and that she is the product of incest, allows the narrator to re-think traditional ideas about what love is and what its boundaries are, and thus the narrator is able to reframe her mother’s attitude towards her as being one of love, as seen by the inheritance her mother leaves her. The narrator also understands that her mother feared being rejected by her own family for this secret. The narrator chooses to accept the truth and overcomes the stigma her mother and uncle were afraid of. Like Lynn and Gan, the narrator in this story embraces her biological inheritance and uses the uniqueness of her situation to forge new kinship relationships that are able to satisfy her need for connection and help her overcome loneliness and feelings of not belonging.
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By Octavia E. Butler
