Guilt and longing are prevalent emotions throughout Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah. The novel’s protagonist, Paul Atreides, has held a position of power in the universe for 12 years, and he’s begun to feel power’s effect on his personal life. He and his lover, Chani, often talk about leaving the city of Arrakis for the desert where Chani grew up and spending the rest of their lives in peace and simplicity. However, not only does Paul feel that he can’t escape the position of messiah into which the Fremen have placed him, but he can see with his oracular vision that his and Chani’s life together will not end happily, for Chani is fated to die in childbirth. Because he can see the future, Paul does not prevent Princess Irulan, his wife, from feeding Chani contraceptives on the orders of the Bene Gesserit (a group that conspires against Paul to thwart his and Chani’s legacy). Paul feels guilty about enabling Chani’s infertility, and later, when she does become pregnant, he feels guilty about subjecting her to a death that he can see coming. Connected to his longing for a different fate, Paul also feels a longing for the past. He can’t resist accepting the Bene Gesserit’s gift of Hayt—the revived ghola of his former master and friend, Duncan Idaho. Although Paul knows that his enemies created Hayt to destroy him, he is drawn to Hayt as a reminder of his past. The preponderance of guilt and longing in Paul’s existence suggests that these sentiments are essential to the human experience, even to the experience of those who are highly successful and influential. Ultimately, however, the novel also shows that guilt and longing are destructive to human life, as they can lead a person to feel anguish over events that they cannot control. In this way, Dune Messiah illustrates the human tendency to plague oneself with futile sentiments.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Guilt and Longing ThemeTracker
Guilt and Longing Quotes in Dune Messiah
I’ll yield up myself, he thought. I’ll rush out while I yet have the strength, fly through space like a bird might not find. It was a useless thought, and he knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.
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.
She should have understood long ago this similarity between the spice and the ghola. Melange was valuable, but it exacted a price—addiction. It added years to a life—decades for some—but it was still just another way to die.
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.
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?
[There would be] time enough then to accept the fact that what he had concealed from her had prolonged her life. Was it evil, he wondered, to prefer Chani to an heir? By what right did he make her choice for her?
“[Paul] was a creature who had developed firmly into one pattern. He’d destroy himself before changing into the opposite of that pattern. That had been the way with the Tleilaxu kwisatz haderach. It’d be the way with this one. And then…the ghola.”
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.
He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout at them: if you need something to worship, then worship life—all life, every last crawling bit of it! We’re all in this beauty together!
Hayt / Idaho / Hayt / Idaho…He became a motionless chain of relative existence, singular, alone. Old memories flooded his mind. He marked them, adjusted them to new understandings, made a beginning at the integration of a new awareness.
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.
