Throughout Dune Messiah, eyes symbolize a person’s trustworthiness and humanity. When Hayt comes to Dune, his mechanical eyes trouble Paul. In every other way, Hayt is the reincarnation of Paul’s trusted master, Duncan Idaho, but Hayt’s mechanical eyes—fashioned by the Tleilaxu who revived Duncan Idaho’s flesh—suggest the painful possibility that the ghola is nothing but his enemy’s pawn, conditioned to destroy Paul. In this way, Hayt’s lack of human eyes indicate the threat he poses.
Paul’s own eyes at first seem like an irrelevant vestige of his human nature. While Paul can see the world around him through his human eyes, the “eyes” of his prescience show him everything that will occur before it physically occurs. However, despite the seeming irrelevance of his eyes, Paul often wishes he could turn off his prescience and see the world only through his human eyes. In other words, he wishes he could trade his vision of fate for the comparatively blind vision of human sight. Therefore, while eyes symbolize power when endowed with the ability to see the future, they also—in their normal seeing condition—indicate the limits of human nature.
In this way, then, eyes also represent how human “blindness”—that is, blindness to fate—is preferable to a gift of superhuman sight. When a stone burner later blinds Paul, Paul resorts to seeing only through his prescience—a state which makes him feel like a mere instrument of the future. This state of blindness leads Paul to end his own life in the desert. Therefore eyes as a symbol point to the flawed nature of power: while Paul can live without their eyes in a state of superhuman power, his attachment to his human limits as represented by his eyes prevents him from ever embracing a complete state of power.
Eyes Quotes in Dune Messiah
This moment of supreme power contained failure. There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction can be lethal.
“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.
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.
“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.”
Alia studied the steel balls which were his eyes: no human expression there. His words had carried a reassuring intensity […] a thing Duncan Idaho might have said. Had the Tleilaxu fashioned their ghola better than they knew—or was this mere sham, part of his conditioning?
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.
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.
Eyes Symbol Timeline in Dune Messiah
