Neo-Slave Narratives give voices to characters who would, otherwise, have been silenced.
Rufus and his parents only exist in Kindred in the way that Dana sees them. Her narrative gives them life.
The voice of a Neo-Slave Narrative also engenders elements of an older oral tradition of story-telling.
"The strategy they all share is that of producing a voice that is discontinuous and part of a larger communal voice" (Rushdy 98).
The Neo-Slave Narrative "draws on the actual life experiences of enslaves Americans and marks its indebtedness to oral tales of slave life told to the author" (Rushdy 87).
Dana's first person narrative is the story of her travel back in time to the antebellum South. It is her story. But it is also Alice's. It is the story of one family whose history had been relegated to a few lines scrawled in the cover of a Bible, whose history was corrupted by the institution of slavery.
But in Dana's narrative, Alice is also given a voice so that her story, her family's story can be known.
Alice: "I don't mean to spend my life here watching my children grow up as slaves and maybe get sold" (Butler 232).