Freedom, Choice and Achieving Self-Realisation in the Dystopian World of Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler Zahra Rezaei, Ida Baizura Bahar*, Zahraa Abdullah Mohan Department of English, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication, Universiti Putra Malaysia 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia Corresponding Author: Ida Baizura Bahar, E-mail: idabb@upm.edu.my ABSTRACT This study examines how the American science fction author Octavia Butler (1947-2006) refects the issue of how Olamina, the protagonist of Parable of the Talents (1998), attempts to establish a new religion, Earthseed, while changing her dystopian world. Butler is a distinguished novelist who brings to light the narrative on human life and challenges in a society where individuals are treated with discrimination and deprived of their rights, freedom, and independence, and takes a serious note of these topics by ofering a representative portrait of the American society through her fction. Here, we explore issues of human freedom, choice and self-realisation in a civil society by utilising a novel combination of the concepts of freedom and choice by John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin as well as self-realisation by Karl Marx as the fundamental elements to examine Olamina’s belief, attitude and the act of making choices. Our fndings reveal that Olamina becomes an assertive and independent woman through two stages of self-realisation, namely self-actualisation and self-externalisation: she fnds her voice, succeeds in challenging her ideological social system and, at last, successfully spreads her new philosophical ideas to another part of the world. Through our original methodology of combining the concepts of freedom, choice and self-realisation, we found that Butler has skillfully depicted the social and technological evolutions which have caused the futuristic dystopias in 2030s California, and further illustrates the ways that characters can confront these changes if given the freedom and the autonomy to act and change their oppressive existence. Key words: Choice, Freedom, Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents, Self-realisation INTRODUCTION From the 18 th century onwards, due to the advancement of social consciousness and individual choice, the issues of human freedom, choice and self-realisation have become the main topics for many novelists and philosophers who attempt to criticise the totalitarian system of society and de- pict the real situations of their time. Debates about freedom and choice were frst highlighted by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who sought to examine the connection between freedom and equality in the civil society. His philosophical ideas and ideologies were often infuential during the French Revolution (1789-1799), and still afect present-day debates on freedom. Social consciousness has been gradually de- veloping in societies as the notion of choice became an im- portant topic for philosophers, such as Rousseau and Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). The concepts of freedom and choice were gradually de- veloped by later philosophers and theorists, such as Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), John Rawls (1921-2002) and David Gauthier (b. 1932), who have had infuential contributions to political theories and the social sciences. Berlin and Rawls have attempted to defne the nature of freedom and the scope Published by Australian International Academic Centre PTY.LTD. Copyright (c) the author(s). This is an open access article under CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.11n.1p.47 of freedom in which a fair, well-order society should give its citizen. In Rawls’ view, in a just society, individuals have freedom or the choice to follow their desires, make their plans and formulate their conceptions of good but it does not mean the individuals’ pursuit of their good interfere with the rights of others (Nagel, 1973). More importantly, self-realisation is an expression that has been used in Western psychology, philosophy, and spir- ituality; and which is deeply connected to the concepts of freedom and choice. As Dimova-Cookson (2013) points out, individuals attain “freedom by living up to … [their] rational nature, by gaining true knowledge [of himself] and struc- turing…. their lives according to it”. In contrast, Karl Marx (1818-1883) defnes the concept “as the full and free actual- isation and externalisation of the powers and abilities of the individual” (Elster, 1986, p. 43). The concepts of freedom, choice and self- realisation have been the focus of scholarship on contemporary fctions set in a dystopian world (Guo 2006, Humann 2010). More importantly, Parable of the Talents (1998) by Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) has been classifed as a dystopian novel where the author has depicted societal and political themes International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature E-ISSN: 2200-3592 & P-ISSN: 2200-3452 www.ijalel.aiac.org.au ARTICLE INFO Article history Received: October 14, 2021 Accepted: January 04, 2022 Published: January 31, 2022 Volume: 11 Issue: 1 Advance access: January 2022 Conficts of interest: None Funding: None