“I won’t always ask”: Complicating Agency in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling

Abstract

This study reads Octavia Butler’s Fledgling as a narrative of agency. Critically engaging previous scholarly tendencies to focus solely on the main protagonist’s successful struggle for self-determination, this essay investigates the ways in which Fledgling complicates and irritates simplistic notions of agency, as the novel questions both the possibility and desirability of a high level of agency.