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.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Fate and Choice ThemeTracker
Fate and Choice 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.
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.
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.
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.
