Rufus' progression, despite our wishes to the opposite, tends to become negative through unsavory manifestations in his personality, etc.—nonetheless, we find this to be only natural as Rufus can only be a product of the conditions of his environment and the systems that he engages.
This is established—we need not prove Rufus' negative development as we encounter such in his encounters with Dana, with others, and his general presentation throughout the story.
Then, a question that arises out of this fact is Dana's dismissiveness and quasi-enabling behaviors towards Rufus: why does she always give Rufus the benefit of the doubt, why is she so...forgiving of his flaws? For somebody from the later 20th century with such modern sensibilities and who embodies the progressive changes that would have been unimaginable in Rufus' era, she sometimes acts with an almost passive and relenting attitude.
For a first thought, might we need to blame Dana? Is this a flaw of hers, one that we should criticize her and use her, rather than Rufus, as a negative example that we should not embody and rather learn from their mistakes? Perhaps we should avoid this conclusion—out of the entire story, Dana, in my opinion, is one of the few that truly seems to have a sort of agency, that she is most relatable. Rufus, Kevin, and others all seem to play their dedicated roles, they need not grapple with any dilemmas and thus, they cannot necessarily be compared to a character like Dana. In Dana's mind, Rufus as a mid-20s year old is not far separated from the much younger version that first made an impression on Dana (this seems very reasonable!). In general, it seems that she grows, develops, as the story continues and changes in a much more personal way, one that is more personal that really and which sets her apart from all others.
We might be able to debate the unreliability of Dana and how her narration might be compromised with her own selfish aims, but the reality might be that there isn't anyone else in the story, that we would compare her with...if we were to compare her to ourselves, could we not also feel similar to how she might?
By virtue of the intrinsic difference that Dana has in relation to all others within Kindred, we can't compare her, if she is to be viewed as one part of this story's whole, to another part. She is a very different character whose job is to not just bring the story and message of Kindred out to us, but to also pull us into her experiences, to make us think what it'd be like to be her.
