Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib) Character Analysis

This moment of supreme power contained failure. There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction can be lethal.

Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.

I’ll yield up myself, he thought. I’ll rush out while I yet have the strength, fly through space like a bird might not find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.

“Accepting prescience, you fill your being with concepts repugnant to the intellect. Your intellectual consciousness, therefore, rejects them. In rejecting, intellect becomes a part of the processes and is subjugated.”

His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind. He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that the universe still eluded him.

Where was Idaho in this shaped-to-measure flesh? It wasn’t flesh…it was a shroud in fleshly shape! [Idaho’s] ghost stared out of metal eyes. Two beings stood side by side in this revenant flesh. One was a threat with its force and nature hidden behind unique veils.

“People cling to the Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place […] Perhaps religion serves the same purpose.”

“[Genghis Khan] didn’t kill them himself. […] He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”

Once…long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.

[There would be] time enough then to accept the fact that what he had concealed from her had prolonged her life. Was it evil, he wondered, to prefer Chani to an heir? By what right did he make her choice for her?

“[Paul] was a creature who had developed firmly into one pattern. He’d destroy himself before changing into the opposite of that pattern. That had been the way with the Tleilaxu kwisatz haderach. It’d be the way with this one. And then…the ghola.”

The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?

He had become a non-being, a stillness which moved itself. At the core of the non-being, there he existed, allowing himself to be led through the streets of his city, following a track so familiar to his visions that it froze his heart with grief.

Otheym’s house, Fate’s house, a place different from the ones around it only it the role Time had chosen for it. It was a strange place to be marked down in history.

“What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”

Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws must inevitably replace morality, replace conscience, even replace the religion by which you think to govern.

He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout at them: if you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!

Awareness turned over at the thought of all those stars above him—an infinite volume. A man must be half mad to imagine he could rule even a teardrop of that volume. He couldn’t begin to imagine the number of subjects his Imperium claimed.

Ahhh, that’s why they gave me Idaho as a ghola, to let me discover how much the recreation is like the original. But now—full restoration…at their price. I’d be a Tleilaxu forevermore. And Chani…chained to the same fate by a threat to our children, exposed once more to the Qizarate’s plotting.

The Fremen […] had said Muad’Dib would never die, that he had entered the world where all possible futures existed, […], wandering there endlessly even after his flesh had ceased to be.

This moment of supreme power contained failure. There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction can be lethal.

Dune was a world of paradox now—a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.

I’ll yield up myself, he thought. I’ll rush out while I yet have the strength, fly through space like a bird might not find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.

“Accepting prescience, you fill your being with concepts repugnant to the intellect. Your intellectual consciousness, therefore, rejects them. In rejecting, intellect becomes a part of the processes and is subjugated.”

His prescient power had tampered with the image of the universe held by all mankind. He had shaken the safe cosmos and replaced security with his Jihad. He had out-fought and out-thought and out-predicted the universe of men, but a certainty filled him that the universe still eluded him.

Where was Idaho in this shaped-to-measure flesh? It wasn’t flesh…it was a shroud in fleshly shape! [Idaho’s] ghost stared out of metal eyes. Two beings stood side by side in this revenant flesh. One was a threat with its force and nature hidden behind unique veils.

“People cling to the Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place […] Perhaps religion serves the same purpose.”

“[Genghis Khan] didn’t kill them himself. […] He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”

Once…long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.

[There would be] time enough then to accept the fact that what he had concealed from her had prolonged her life. Was it evil, he wondered, to prefer Chani to an heir? By what right did he make her choice for her?

“[Paul] was a creature who had developed firmly into one pattern. He’d destroy himself before changing into the opposite of that pattern. That had been the way with the Tleilaxu kwisatz haderach. It’d be the way with this one. And then…the ghola.”

The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?

He had become a non-being, a stillness which moved itself. At the core of the non-being, there he existed, allowing himself to be led through the streets of his city, following a track so familiar to his visions that it froze his heart with grief.

Otheym’s house, Fate’s house, a place different from the ones around it only it the role Time had chosen for it. It was a strange place to be marked down in history.

“What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law—our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”

Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws must inevitably replace morality, replace conscience, even replace the religion by which you think to govern.

He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout at them: if you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!

Awareness turned over at the thought of all those stars above him—an infinite volume. A man must be half mad to imagine he could rule even a teardrop of that volume. He couldn’t begin to imagine the number of subjects his Imperium claimed.

Ahhh, that’s why they gave me Idaho as a ghola, to let me discover how much the recreation is like the original. But now—full restoration…at their price. I’d be a Tleilaxu forevermore. And Chani…chained to the same fate by a threat to our children, exposed once more to the Qizarate’s plotting.

The Fremen […] had said Muad’Dib would never die, that he had entered the world where all possible futures existed, […], wandering there endlessly even after his flesh had ceased to be.