Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dune, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power and Violence
Free Will and Fate
Environment and Human Culture
Human Cognitive Advances
Summary
Analysis
The epigraph from Princess Irulan’s text “The Humanity of Muad’Dib” relates Muad’Dib’s early lesson of learning how to learn—he realized that every experience could teach him something valuable. This belief was then augmented by the specialized mental training he received from cognitive experts throughout his childhood. These traits explain his almost unbelievably swift adaptation to life on Arrakis.
Paul’s swift ascendancy to power in Dune is largely due to his mental attitudes and cognitive capabilities. Because Paul gains Imperial control and is prophesized to save humanity, the narrator suggests that it is human cognition rather than technological capabilities that will profoundly shape human culture.
Themes
Paul Atreides pretends to be asleep while his mother, Jessica, talks with Dr. Yueh in the next room. When she leaves, Paul gets up, but freezes when he notices a lethal “hunter-seeker” motion-tracking weapon appear from his bed’s headboard. The hunter-seeker tries to kill him, as well as the Fremen housekeeper Shadout Mapes when she enters Paul’s room to summon him to Duke Leto. Paul manages to use his knowledge of a hunter-seekers to safely immobilize the weapon. Mapes states that she must repay her debt of “water burden” for saving her life, and reveals that the Fremen are certain that there is a traitor in House Atreides.
For the first time in his life, Paul has to rely on nothing more than his own skills to stay alive. His intensive childhood training ensures he is more than up to the task of preventing the hunter-seeker from assassinating anyone. Shadout Mapes’s claim that she owns him a debt of “water burden” foreshadows the ultimate value that Fremen culture places on water—Paul will later learn that Fremen consider water to be so precious that they will reclaim it from the air and even from dead human bodies.
Themes
