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Section 5
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 calls Page, who agrees to let him into the precog room. “You’re out of your mind. Why in hell did you come back?” Page asks as Anderton enters the room. Anderton quickly turns to the task at hand, retrieving the two half-hour tapes that constitute the minority report. “The preview of the murder had canceled out the murder,” he realizes. Trembling in anticipation, Anderton copies the report, but then thinks to himself that Witwer has surely already seen the report, so showing it to him will not prove Anderton’s innocence. As Anderton knocks himself for his stupidity, Lisa enters, declaring, “You damn fool!” Dismayed by his lack of caution, she offers to give him a ride away from the station before Witwer sees him.
Here, Anderton thinks critically about the dynamics of free will and fate (precognition) that rule his world. He highlights how his ability to “preview” his own crime by having access to the precognitive data thanks to his position as the head of Precrime actually “canceled out the murder”—in other words, once he knew he was going to commit a crime, he resolved to not let that happen. In the thick of anxiety and chaos, Anderton doesn’t consider in this moment the implications of this statement: that other people may have also resolved to not commit their predicted crimes had they been given access to the precognitive data about themselves. This reasonable possibility means, then, that there are people in the detention camps who should have been given the chance to change before being locked away.
Themes
