Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dune Messiah, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power
Religion
Guilt and Longing
Fate and Choice
Summary
Analysis
On Dune, Paul lies in a melange-drugged stupor. In his head, he sees a moon become an oval, then fall. He sits up, terrified. On the outside, his room’s windows blaze with daylight, while in his mind the moon falls through night. Paul feels that the image of the falling moon represents lost personal security. Paul’s huge dose of melange shows him the terrible way to end the Jihad. His mind tolls the word “disengage.” The flowers by the window make him miss Chani. He wonders what she would say if she knew he wanted to die before reaching the end of his power.
Traditionally a symbol of immortality and eternality, the image of the falling moon in Paul’s mind suggests the demise of both these things in his future. In his heightened prescience, Paul’s fate comes to him as a symbol: the exact details of his demise are not visible to Paul in the cosmic image of the moon. This illustrates that prescience speaks in a symbolic language—but also that much remains unknown to the seer.
Themes
Paul walks out on the balcony. He ponders the moon and the strange death of the Fremen woman addicted to semuta. He paces the balcony, wondering if the moon offers the hope of escape. Below him, the city bustles. Walking to the other end of the balcony, Paul sees suburbs and Alia’s temple, which depicts the moon symbol of the Muad’Dib. Paul hates his city. He once felt that he was the inventor of government, but now he feels that he is on an ancient path from which he can’t stray.
Although the moon signifies the demise of power, Paul also reads it as a sign of his potential for freedom. His city and his position feel like bondage—he feels that they rule him rather than the other way around. In this view, the demise of his power would actually allow Paul to live the life he wants. In other words, freedom is synonymous with defeat to Paul.
Themes
Paul puts his hand over his eyes, and the moon in his mind falls. When he looks back at his city, the buildings appear as a “monstrous imperial barbarity.” He feels that this is the architecture of a “demented history” and artistry abuts tastelessness. Paul feels the pressure of a “mass-unconscious” rushing at him like an unstoppable tidal wave. The Jihad is a mere “eye-blink” in the larger movement of the tide. Other legends that once seemed eternal died long ago. From inside his Keep, Paul hears the song of the Jihad: a sentimental ballad of a woman left behind on Dune.
Compared to the enormity of the universe and history in which his reign lasts only briefly, Paul’s city appears to him as obscenely enormous. His city, holding a false claim to power and eminence, is cheap and overdone. But Paul sees the universe—which is like a “mass unconsciousness” acting against Paul’s conscious will, as authoritative emblems of nature, such as the tidal wave.
Themes
A shadow moves on the balcony. Whirling around to see the ghola, Paul asks if he is Duncan Idaho or Hayt. Hayt says he is whatever Paul prefers. Looking out at the Shield Wall, Paul says that a vision troubles him. Hayt says that when he was created, visions troubled him too. Paul describes his vision of the falling moon. Hayt says Paul is drunk on time and that he is running from death. Fascinated by a familiar mole on Hayt’s chin, Paul says that he doesn’t want to live in the future he sees. Paul asks where there is substance when the world is made up of events. Hayt says that Paul’s prescience gives him delusions of immortality; even Paul’s empire must die eventually.
Hayt gives another reason for why prescience is a flawed power; because prescience shows a person the future, it leads them to believe that they will live much longer than perhaps they will—that they will live as long as the future extends. In this way, prescience makes a person forget their humanness to a dangerous degree. It makes a person unable to accept their fate and mortality. Without this inability to accept his immortality, Paul would be less afraid of his demise.
Themes
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Angered, Paul says he doesn’t need powers to know that he will die like others before him. Paul asks if Hayt is destroying him by preventing him from collecting his thoughts, and Hayt asks how one can collect chaos. When Paul asks what Hayt knows of prescience, Hayt says he knows that people fear what they seek. Hayt ventures that Paul fears things that move by themselves, like his own powers. When Paul says Hayt is bad at comforting, Hayt—his face spasming to look just like Duncan Idaho—says he tries. Wondering about Hayt’s face spasm, Paul whispers that his moon has a name.
Counterintuitively, Hayt illustrates Paul’s power of prescience as chaos rather than as something which controls chaos. This suggests that Paul’s powers—although they are his powers—are just as beyond his control as other forces in the universe. In this way, Paul’s powers are not really his powers at all; he has access to the future through them, but they don’t make him more powerful, because he still has no control over what he sees.
Themes
Paul lets the vision of the moon flow over him. His terrifying future involves Chani’s absence. Visions of his lover fill his mind and disappear. Paul watches three limping pilgrims in dirty robes hurry into Alia’s temple. Paul’s persistent vision tells him that people only stir “the waters” briefly, before submitting to Time. He wonders what it means that he doesn’t exist but that he occurred.
This passage reveals a critical detail: Paul dreads his future because Chani is absent from it. This knowledge makes Paul helpless, unable to enjoy the person whom he loves, knowing that soon she will be gone. When Paul says that he occurred but didn’t exist, he is troubling over his immortality.
Themes
