Symbiont Servant

When reading Fledgling, with Shori, we learn about the Ina society. In this novel, Butler invents a whole biology and anthropology of vampire life. It is established that these vampires outlive the human race, the Ina live for about 500 years or even more. When they are injured, they can self- repair, (Shori clearly shows the reader) on a diet of red meat. The Ina society live exclusively of human blood alone. They also possess an extraordinary sense of smell, together with more acute sight and hearing than human beings do; all of these senses come into play in their relationships with one another, as well as human beings. Unlike our society, the Ina society, female Ina are more powerful than male and are organized around gender- segregated extended families. The male young live with the family of their fathers, the female with the family of their mothers. The Ina also have complex relationships with their “symboints,” the human beings upon whom they feed. In the novel, vampires almost never kill their human prey; they live together with them, and have sex with them, in extended families of seven or eight human symbionts for each vampire. Whether male or female, vampires generally have symbionts of bother genders, and the symbionts often develop sexual relationships with one another. So all in all, Ina society involves both vampires and human beings, involved in complex webs of polyamory.

Since Wright is Shori’s symbiont I have been trying to figure out what it means to be the human symbiont of a vampire. As readers we see only human thoughts and feelings through her narration, however, how do we know that is only her human thoughts and feelings. Vampire saliva seems to be both addictive and antiseptic for human beings: the human beings experience an immense sexual pleasure from being bitten, and quickly become dependent upon it. But with that, vampire saliva also results in their leading long and healthy lives: they never get sick, and they live much longer than ordinary human beings. The symbiont life seems to be ones servitude. Most vampires are ethical (however each individual reader wants to define that) enough to give their human prey some small amount of choice, to leave in an early stage of their relationship. So far, that is how far I have gotten through what a symbiont means…