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 “Arrakis Awakening” contemplates the “mystical fusion” of Fremen religious belief. Irulan recites “The Old Man’s Hymn,” which she claims all who audiences are moved by, and which describes desert flora and fauna while relating it to themes of time, glory and danger.
The Arrakeen desert landscapes and creatures are so powerful in their beauty that Princess Irulan claims their description in song moves all listeners profoundly.
Themes
A man crawls along the top of a sand dune in the blazing sun. It is Liet-Kynes, who was captured by House Harkonnen and then left in the desert without supplies or equipment. With no stillsuit, Liet-Kynes cannot survive in the fierce conditions. He is delirious from the heat and lack of water, and so weakened that he is now stumbling and crawling along the sand.
Liet-Kynes’s fear that helping the Atreides family escape the Harkonnens might lead to Fremen ruin has in fact led to his own demise.
Themes
Even in his delirious state, Liet-Kynes recognizes the smell of a pre-spice mass under the sand and can tell that it will soon explode upward out of the sand. He starts to hallucinate that his father Pardot Kynes (the first Arrakeen planetologist) is with him, lecturing him about how to terraform Arrakis into a paradise for human life with lush vegetation and bodies of surface water. His father reproaches Liet-Kynes for straying from his ecological mission to help Paul Atreides. He also signals the importance of his son educating the Fremen communities about their planet and how they can help shape it toward a more hospitable ecology.
The visions of Pardot Kynes add to Liet-Kynes’s despair, also berating the dying man for his foolish (if noble) actions. But Pardot Kynes’s lecturing also illustrates the immense impact that Liet-Kynes and the Fremen have had in harnessing desert power and educating their communities to make ecological changes that are beginning to alter the Arrakeen sandscapes. Liet-Kynes has experienced a profoundly meaningful life and passed on his knowledge to future generations.
Themes
As birds of prey begin to circle overhead, Liet-Kynes considers the organic process that is occurring deep below the sand. There are small creatures that he calls “little makers” who are giving water and organic matter to feed and grow a pre-spice mass. At a certain point the mass begins to grow quickly, and produces a large amount of carbon dioxide. This gas will reach a point where it explodes, blowing the pre-spice mass to the planet’s surface where the oxidation turns the material into crop known as spice.
Through Liet-Kynes’s delirious ramblings, the narrator informs readers about how the valuable spice crop is formed. Liet-Kynes’s understanding that the pre-spice mass below him will soon erupt, coupled with the circling raptors overhead, suggest that he is letting nature take its course to end his life.
Themes
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Liet-Kynes continues to hallucinate visions of his father Pardot Kynes, who is explaining the plans he began decades ago to alter the Arrakeen climate and that his son has continued. The pre-spice process that Liet-Kynes has been thinking of reaches a critical point amount of carbon dioxide, and the resulting explosion kills the planetologist.
Liet-Kynes dies in pain but reflecting on the glorious mission he has helped facilitate to change the climate on Arrakis and offer future generations of Fremen better lives.
Themes
