The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler is a future-based dystopian novel that follows the coming-of-age journey of protagonist Lauren Olamina, a young black woman facing the difficult task of surviving and traveling to north through California on a quest to found his own religious community, Earthseed, after his neighborhood in Robledo was destroyed by drug-addicted thieves and murderers. Lauren and two other survivors of the invasion of her neighborhood, Zahra and Harry, accompany her on her travels north in hopes of creating a better future for herself to escape the tumult of violence, arson and theft that exists in the economically and socially collapsed world in which they live. live. Along the way, the group takes in other refugees who soon become part of Lauren's Earthseed community called Acorn at the end of the novel. Lauren's central belief in Earthseed that "God is change" helps her adapt to survive in California's post-apocalyptic landscape. Two important themes in the novel are freedom and slavery, both of which Butler uses in different ways of telling African American history in the context of the future. Butler describes slavery in the novel as manifested in two different ways, one of the future being debt slavery triggered by capitalism and the other forced labor in rural areas of the nation, painting the picture of African American plantation slavery. Lauren serves as a symbol of freedom from the past through her journey to escape the crumbling state of society and establish a new life elsewhere, all while helping others join her along the way. Both uses of these themes contribute to Butler's vision of the future in which freedom is diminishing and slavery is permeating, a society that echoes the past for African Americans and their struggles for human rights. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Lauren's character rejects this idea by demonstrating that the determination to rebuild a once destroyed community in her life is possible and can repair the universal loss human society is facing. Butler's world involves the regression of America's “freedom” and progress toward a slave state, where the future now mirrors the past. One of the central manifestations of slavery in the novel is debt bondage in which a person is economically obligated to their worker or debtor to repay the debt. The prevalence of debt slavery in the crumbling economy of Butler's dystopian future pushes forward his message that slavery did not cease to exist beyond its birth on plantations and took on a modernized form through the exploitative effects of capitalism . We are first introduced to the existence of modern debt slavery in Chapter 11, where constant robberies in Lauren's walled Robledo neighborhood push local families to leave the walled community in search of safety. The neighborhood is informed of the opportunity to leave Robledo and settle in Olivar, a coastal town recently purchased by KSF, a Japanese-German-Canadian company that aims to dominate the agriculture and solar industry along the coast by attracting its residents with abundance of jobs, security and guaranteed food supply. In exchange for these benefits, citizens will pay high taxes and receive low wages, driving up the cost of living. Desperate to stimulate their economy, the citizens of Olivar have voted for the KSF to take control and revitalize the job market. The taking ofOlivar's power sparks debate among community members, particularly between Lauren and her stepmother, Cory. Lauren and her father both recognize the true cost of acquiring KSF: gaining capital by perpetually indebting its residents, its workers, offering low wages for labor, and high taxes. He notes how this method of exploitation is an “old company town trick” to “get people into debt, keep them, and make them work harder” (Butler 111). Cory disagrees and tells Lauren that "there's no reason to believe that society would allow this kind of thing" (Butler 113). Lauren recognizes Cory's desperation to escape the uncertainty of everyday life, but cannot reconcile herself to the idea that life in Olivar is better than life in Robledo knowing that they will have to sacrifice their freedom for safety and live in debt . “Freedom is dangerous, Cory, but it's also precious. You can't just throw it away or let it get away,” she points out (Butler 112), explaining to her stepmother that even though Robledo isn't the safest, their community has more agency than Olivar, where they will be a slave to debt. Privatization of Olivar by the KSF is intended to “illustrate how contemporary capitalist enterprises such as multinational corporations, in their contempt for humanity due to their hunger for the almighty dollar, oppress people as much as the antebellum system of slavery did in the past historical” (Allen 2009). SF serves as the perpetrator of modernized debt slavery, a capitalist machine that manipulates the general public into believing that working for its company will provide them with the benefit of security, when in reality the result is that its workers are deprived of their freedom by spending a lifetime paying off debt to society. The evolution of slavery transcends race in the context of the novel, where anyone can be exploited for profit. Furthermore, “the KSF situation is also reminiscent of the way mining companies in places like West Virginia treated their workers early in American history, as well as the sharecropping system that developed in the South after the Civil War” (Allen 2009 ). Butler draws a parallel between the future and past of power struggles between workers and their companies to warn that if regulations are not applied to large corporations in our generation, history could repeat itself at the expense of human rights. Slavery also manifests itself in its more “traditional” form where “Black and Latino workers are held in bondage by Southern farm owners” (Allen 2009). Butler continues to allude to America's past of slavery by illustrating how agricultural labor still persists in rural areas of the nation, evoking the image of slavery on African American plantations. The juxtaposition between debt slavery triggered by capitalism in cities and slavery on farms presents two different landscapes of the past and future coexisting. We discover the continuation of forced labor that exists in Lauren's world later in the novel, where she meets Emery, a runaway former slave who reveals his past of toiling on a farm to repay debts. In Chapter 23, the group comes across Emery and her daughter sleeping at their campsite. They take them both in and she tells Lauren about her experience of having to pay labor for food and shelter and how the low wages they earned were not enough to support them. expenses. She and her now dead husband were slaves “forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be “disciplined” if they did not meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without their families…” (Butler 265). The experience ofEmery's oppression by his slave master describes the same abuse that would have occurred on plantations hundreds of years ago. Slave masters would use these same tactics to manipulate their slaves and keep them from disobeying. His experience also provides evidence of the return to a labor-dependent agricultural economy, considering how huge amounts of the population have fled cities destroyed by violence, theft, arson, etc. We see this exact image in chapter 20 where Lauren and her group detour around the Bay Area as it is being destroyed by arsonists and thieves who "seem intent on destroying what remains" and are "desperate, fleeing people from their guns, money, food and water..." (Butler 226). The drastic change in the landscape of Lauren's world further illustrates how America is returning to its past as a slave economy, underscoring Butler's idea that history is cyclical and that slavery is not a thing of the past and will continue to persist in the time if it is not addressed. Freedom is used thematically through Lauren and her journey north in search of a better life, leaving the past behind. She represents a new hope for life in a deteriorating world around her, demonstrated through her determination to help herself and others escape their lives. difficult circumstances and create a new settlement in the north. Butler portrays Lauren as a former slave and a symbol of freedom for others like her to triumph over their past and believe that life can thrive in such a destructive world. Lauren's travels involve her and her group meeting different disadvantaged groups and individuals who they help guide on their journeys with them. He forms an alliance with a mixed-breed couple, Travis and Natividad, after saving their water from theft and protecting them from a wild dog attack. Later, the group rescues Allie and Jill, former prostitutes, from the rubble of a collapsed house and shelters former slaves Emery and her daughter Tori, as well as Grayson and her daughter Doe. At the beginning of the novel, Lauren was very suspicious of others, especially in chapter 16, where she refused to let a seemingly innocent old man cook her potatoes in the fire. Now Lauren puts herself at risk to help others in need and provides them with food and supplies from her camp, as well as the added security of traveling in a pack. Her group now consists of former slaves, prostitutes, and minorities she has helped get back on their feet, mirroring the leadership of Harriet Tubman, a former slave who helped slaves escape north to Canada via the Underground Railroad (Allen 2009). Likewise, Lauren symbolizes being the conductor of one's own underground railroad, offering herself and others in need the opportunity, the freedom, the starting over (Manuel 2004). Butler draws a parallel between these two black heroines as liberators for the disadvantaged to leave their traumatic pasts behind and start anew. These parallels are significant to how Butler tells African-American history in the context of the 21st century in the novel and how Lauren's journey to Canada to found Earthseed, her religious community, is similar to slaves traveling north in search of freedom. Acorn, the first Earthseed community he establishes at the end of the novel, is the symbol of freedom from the past and similarly represents the spiritual liberation of slaves who triumph over slavery (Manuel 2004). In chapter 25, the last chapter of the novel, one of the lines reads "From seed to tree, from tree to forest", which represents the completion of Lauren's task of surviving her journey.