Dune Messiah

by

Frank Herbert

Fate and Choice Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
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Religion  Theme Icon
Guilt and Longing Theme Icon
Fate and Choice  Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dune Messiah, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate and Choice  Theme Icon

Dune Messiah explores the nature of fate and the power to see the future. Not only is the world of Dune Messiah subject to fate, but its protagonist—the Emperor of the fictional planet Dune, Paul Atreides—is gifted with the power of prescience, or the power to see the future. From the outset, this power is not a positive thing. In fact, as an omniscient narrator claims at the outset of the novel, “completely accurate and total prediction is lethal.” This foreshadows that, while prescience allows Paul to see and prepare for his future, this power will ultimately lead to his downfall. Indeed, power to see the fated future causes Paul anguish because it prevents his free choice. Paul confronts the prospect of a future that he is powerless to prevent, having glimpsed early on that his lover Chani is going to die in childbirth and that he will fall from power. He runs from his visions and often wishes that he could live without knowledge of the future. When an exploding stone burner physically blinds Paul’s eyes, his prescience is the only thing that allows him to see. He is able to live and act with a different kind of sight, fulfilling each moment as it appears to him in his oracular visions. From then on, Paul feels like a prisoner of fate, living out his doomed future with no capacity for choice. However, this new blindness also causes Paul to accept the fact that he has no choice other than to willingly submit to his fate. When he relinquishes control over his future, Paul actually experiences unforeseen events; he had not foreseen that Chani was pregnant with twins—only that she would give birth to a daughter—so the birth of his son and heir to his throne comes as a pleasant surprise. Dune Messiah, in illustrating Paul’s relationship to fate, shows how a person can experience a kind of choice and peace only once they choose to embrace their fate.

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Fate and Choice ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Fate and Choice appears in each chapter of Dune Messiah. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Fate and Choice Quotes in Dune Messiah

Below you will find the important quotes in Dune Messiah related to the theme of Fate and Choice .
Chapter 1 Quotes

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

Related Characters: Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib)
Related Symbols: Eyes
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib) (speaker)
Related Symbols: Eyes
Page Number: 75
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib)
Related Symbols: Eyes
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

He was near, she knew—that shadow-figure of a man she could sense in her future, but could not see. It angered her that no power of prescience could put flesh on that figure.

Related Characters: Alia Atreides
Related Symbols: Eyes
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib)
Related Symbols: Eyes
Page Number: 225
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib) , Otheym
Related Symbols: Eyes
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib) (speaker), Hayt (Duncan Idaho) , Chani , Scytale
Page Number: 320
Explanation and Analysis: