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Section 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Minority Report, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Security vs. Liberty
Fate and Free Will
Trust and Paranoia
Summary
Analysis
Anderton flees the scene and catches a bus to a hotel in a rough part of town. Going through the packet, he finds a card that reads: “The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.” Later, turning on the radio inside his room, he hears a Precrime radio announcement. The announcer warns the public of Anderton’s criminal status and explains how Precrime functions, including the multiple-futures theory: “If only one time-path existed, precognitive information would be of no importance, since no possibility would exist, in possessing this information, of altering the future.” Suddenly realizing that only two of the precogs foresaw him killing Kaplan, Anderton resolves to examine the minority report.
The card that Fleming gives to Anderton is a significant clue, as it prompts him to think about the minority report. The radio announcement, which provides a theoretical explanation for the story’s precognitive dynamics, establishes why Precrime works at all: if the future was predetermined, then the police could not alter it. This further suggests that if the police can use their free will to alter the future, then so can anyone else, provided they access the relevant data. Just like the tension between liberty and safety that runs throughout the story, the Precrime system hinges on a constant push and pull between free will and fate (precognition).
Themes
