A home is one of the places where an individual feels safest and likes to spend most of their time. In Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred, the concept of home is complicated by the conflicting emotions of the characters Dana and Kevin. This shows how the idea of ​​home can be influenced by having stronger experiences elsewhere. Dana and Kevin, after being teleported from one time period to another, are forced to reconsider their beliefs about what home is to them. Their experience in the 19th century made Dana and Kevin start to feel more accustomed to it and make it feel like it was their home. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay At the beginning of the novel, Dana feels as if the new apartment she shares with Kevin in 1976 is her home. She says, after her second stay at Rufus, “God, it hurts and I'm so tired. But it doesn't matter. I am home". Dana has had few encounters in the 19th century as she hasn't been there long, but the experiences she has are mostly negative. He also had no connection to the people there other than realizing that some of them were his ancestors, so he understandably sees his 1976 apartment as his home. It's the time she grew up in, and it's where Kevin is and the things she likes/is most familiar with, while 19th century Maryland is a time and place she's been in since less than a day. As Dana begins to make more trips back in time to the antebellum South, she has more experiences there and makes more connections with the people there. He gets more and more used to everything there is and how it works. When she thinks about it after a couple more visits and after getting Kevin back, she thinks that Rufus' time was a “clearer, stronger reality” and that “the work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse.” Dana has done and experienced so much there that it has become a place she is familiar enough with to call home. She recalls that she “remembered feeling relief when she saw the house, feeling like she was back home. And having to stop and correct herself, remind herself that she was in a strange and dangerous place." These thoughts show Dana's mixed emotions about the plantation and what it represented to her. Even though it was a place where he had felt a lot of pain, he had also had some good experiences and had formed strong emotional bonds with some of the people there. With this, Butler is trying to point out that home might sometimes have painful or dangerous things along with the good things, but it will still be home if that's what you think about it. In Kindred, Butler complicates the concept of home by showing that home isn't always the place you feel safest or the place you always want to be. After the epilogue in the Reader's Guide, Robert Crossley argues that Butler, with Kindred, offers a challenge to the expression “Home is where the heart is,” along with other expressions, which essentially means that home is where someone always wants to be. He writes that “When Dana's time travel finally stops and she returns to her home in Los Angeles in 1976, the meaning of a homecoming has become incredibly complicated. His first act, once his arm is sufficiently healed, will be to fly to what is now Maryland; both her home in California and the Weylin plantation inevitably became 'home' for her.” Dana feels that there are two places that are her home, but a person cannot want to be in two places at the same time, so the expression "Home is where the heart is" has been questioned. Butler did it..