Parable of the Sower

In Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower we see 15 year old Lauren Olamina write in her journal about life in nearly apocalyptic suburb of Los Angeles. The year is 2025, water is more precious than gasoline, and communities are walled in to protect its inhabitants. Butler's choice to write this novel in the first-person diary form allows the reader to understand the circumstances and place themselves in the shoes of Lauren. Lauren is a real stand-out character in her community, one of the few who dares to challenge the status quo. Lauren's diary guides us through the daily struggles faced by her and her neighbors, including rape, robbery, and murder. When this book was written in 1993, Butler could not have imagined the impending water crises we would be in now. Water supplies are shrinking or being bought up by foreign countries, calling serious attention to how precious our water is, and how we need to reexamine our water usage to allow enough for future generations to prevent the future that Butler predicts.

Lauren's hyperempathy, the term Butler uses to describe Lauren's ability to feel and empathize to an extreme degree, brought on by her mother's drug use during pregnancy, would appear to be Butler's way of comparing Lauren to a God-like figure. Lauren mentions that she takes on the feelings of the living, feeling pain when others are hurting, sorrow when others are sad, calling to mind how Jesus Christ died for the sins of all, but instead of dying, Lauren feels and empathizes. Butler has crafted Lauren to be a conscious and worldly, clearly understanding more of the outside world than the other kids in the community. With these characteristics in mind, I feel that Lauren will go on to do great things as a leader later on in the novel. When she reveals to Joanne that she has been reading books on nature and survival, it leads me to believe that she will not be confined by the walls of home for long.