I want to talk about Dune today—the books, not the movies. I’ve just finished the second book, Dune Messiah, and felt very moved by it. I tore into it quickly after finishing Dune, I’d heard that it’s much shorter and serves as a nice companion piece, so I’d been holding off on a full reflection or any Googling along the lines of “Dune ending explained” until now. There’s many more places I’m sure the story will go from here—there’s six mainline books, not counting the more questionable books from the author’s son—but I feel satisfied after having waited, and now have a lot of thoughts swirling around.
There’s really not much to say about Dune without spoiling it, so see my full discussion in the section below for my detailed thoughts and analysis. Suffice it to say, however, that it’s a sci-fi epic for a reason; the conversations it engenders are simply incredible. I found it fascinating and fully intend to read the rest of the original saga.
For those who have not read any of the Dune saga, before discussing the story details I’d like to recommend you give the books a try. They seem to have a reputation for being difficult to read, but I didn’t find this to be the case at all—and I’m a big dummy who has an ADHD internet-raddled brain that has struggled to read for pleasure since childhood. There’s some arcane terminology thrown around, sure, but most of that is of no real consequence. Don’t worry about keeping track of what a “suspensor lamp” or anything is, these things are not expanded upon, they’re mostly unimportant set dressing. There’s only a few things that you have to understand to really get what’s going on, and don’t worry, Frank Herbert will repeat them for you. Spice, CHOAM, mentats, the Bene Gesserit, etc., these are the big picture things that will help you understand and they’re not too hard to pick up. When in doubt, just keep reading.
If anything, I would recommend watching the first Dune movie from Denis Villeneuve before reading, it covers roughly half of the first book. This was my experience going in, and I think it actually heightened my reading quite a bit. Reading the book is a wholly unique experience, totally different to watching the film. And it really helped to take some of the pressure off keeping track of all the things you’re introduced to in the first few chapters, and allowed me to place them better in context. Plus, the film is simply amazing. It’s a beauty to behold, and if nothing else you should watch that damn movie (I’m eagerly awaiting the second part this November).
This isn’t to say the books can’t be confusing. No doubt, there’s many paragraphs where the characters wax philosophically about a topic in ways that I try to follow but often go over my head (particularly in the second book). This is okay. You don’t have to follow every small detail to get the bigger picture. These are intricate plots, so I often found myself mostly getting the fine details of why X had to happen for Y, but nevertheless really appreciating what I thought was the subtextual reading, what was actually being communicated as important for the characters and their relationships.
All that being said, I’d like to share what I came away with for anyone who has read the books (full spoilers for the first two ahead). The series has been analyzed for decades, so I won’t claim to be treading new ground, per se. But they cover such a vast amount of ideas, and are so open to being reread and picking out new interpretations, that I consider myself lucky to be able to read them and wish to share in this conversation. There’s so much one could focus on, and there’s many perspectives you could take. Here’s mine (so far, at least!).
I really loved Dune Messiah, it felt like everything I was expecting from the end of Dune. From briefly talking with others about the relationship between the two books, however, I’m not quite sure what they were expecting after Dune.
After watching the 2021 film and hearing vague discussion about it, I had absorbed the general gist that Dune is a warning tale about messianic figures rather than a celebration of them, and my subsequent reading of Dune also more than primed me for this given how much the book actively tells you the tragedy that is about to take place—Dune and Dune Messiah have a literal prescient storytelling structure. Each chapter opens with an epigraph that often reflects on the outcome of the events to come from an in-universe historical perspective, telling you early on the broad strokes of what happened in the past you’re currently reading about. Add on to that that the prescient characters constantly tell the reader the possible paths the universe could take for millenia and the consequences that may follow every action, and there was no way I couldn’t know the destruction that would come. I knew early on to expect that Paul would become the Fremen leader Muad’Dib, that he would lead them in a jihad to conquer the universe, slaughtering billions upon billions, decimating planets, and that this was inevitable. In the whole second half of the book, Paul was explicitly looking for a way to stop this from occurring, and when he couldn’t find one, looking for a way to end the jihad as soon as he could (or so he said).
There is an entire universe of machinations that placed Paul in this moment, that gave him his “terrible purpose,” but early on the primary culprit was identified as the Bene Gesserit. The order had spent centuries scheming, sitting in the ear of emperors to manufacture blood lines and install religions through the Missionaria Protectiva, all in service of creating and controlling the pinnacle of humankind, their Kwisatz Haderach. Paul considered himself no more than a vessel, being placed in this moment without his consent, now forced to attempt to manage these outcomes. Jihad was inevitable with or without his cooperation, the prophecy had been set. His death would only result in an even more monstrous jihad fueled by martyrdom, and he couldn’t walk away (that wouldn’t stop it, and worse, it would become something out of his control).
I was shocked, then, to learn that Dune Messiah is felt by many to be a “take down” of the first book, a subversion of your expectations. The first book, it is said, brought you up alongside Paul, and the second brought you back down to Earth with the full implications of Muad’Dib. I didn’t feel this way at all! Paul may not have seemed as horrid in the first book as he does in the second, but I certainly did not find much good by the end of the first, this was no hero’s journey. Paul goes along the path of becoming Muad’Dib, still thinking he could take control of his position so as to stop the jihad, but in the final confrontation with the emperor and the Harkonnen heir Feyd’Rautha he does away with this belief and chooses to engage in a game in which the jihad is inevitable. He denies Gurney Halleck his revenge on Feyd’Rautha, and decides to duel the boy himself: if he wins, he tells himself, he will cement his place as emperor and begin his jihad; if he dies, the jihad prophecy will fulfill itself, with him as martyr. I am amenable to the idea that Paul is inherently an unreliable narrator here, that he was ultimately wrong that the jihad was inevitable at this point, but even if we do take Paul at his word that this was the “least bad” option, this is a terribly depressing ending. Whether the jihad was actually inevitable we may not know, but once Paul makes the decision to duel Feyd’Rautha, it is clear to the reader that it is definitely supposed to be now. The ramifications of his actions, which we see play out in Dune Messiah, were already explicitly fated by the end of Dune. This was not a success story.
So, I came away from Dune simply wanting more. It felt so abrupt, I needed to know why Paul had done it, what the outcome would be. I wanted what Dune Messiah ended up being. And for most of my time reading Dune Messiah, its subject and its short length made me wish it was simply the fourth book added on to Dune’s three internal books. On reflection this wasn’t really necessary, a full treatise on these outcomes as a standalone novel, detached from the buildup of Dune, probably makes sense. Still, Messiah feels like the perfect companion novel to cap off Paul’s life. It was everything I expected and more.
The book felt a bit more complex than Dune even with its short length. The exact machinations of the plots against the Atreides are more involved the second go around. There are more of them, for starters, and the various conspiracies conflict in certain ways. Some are fulfilled and not fulfilled at different points, and the actors’ allegiances to each shift rapidly. But a lot of the complexity was pulling on things that were actually already there in the first book, Messiah just puts it all into focus. It delves more explicitly into the political and philosophical ramifications of the jihad, Paul’s deification, and his prescience. These were the parts that mattered most for me, rather than fully following the intricacies of the unfolding conspiracies. There was a lot to like.
We come to a Fremen drastically changed. A population clearly easy to make religious fanatics of following the Missionaria Protectiva, they’ve now let their messiah lead them to engaging in galaxy-wide genocide and revenge. What once were sympathetic underestimated colonized people have now become greedy water-fat colonizers who only want more (e.g., Korba and his allies in the Qizarate who attempted to kill Muad’Dib to rule by themselves, in his name). Their interesting culture and traditions now ring hollow, inscribed in and followed via the letter of the religious government’s law rather than coming about as a natural byproduct of survival on the desert planet. Jumping forward only a decade, any luster the Fremen had in the eyes of the reader largely disappears, their strength clearly having come not from any immutable difference they held as a people but simply from the structure of their society and material conditions (who would’ve thought).
Meanwhile, even in the middle of his genocidal jihad, we find a Paul that is still trying to convince himself and everyone else that he is helpless. “We’re all trying to figure out the person who did this,” he says to you, holding the knife. Every person he mentions his helplessness to has no idea what he is talking about, and meets him with the equivalent of a blank stare. Of course he can stop the jihad, they all say, he merely must order it. They all simply can’t see what Paul can see, though. All the paths he sees before him are worse than the one he’s currently on, as grotesque as the path may be. In the literal plot, there is not much to tell us that Paul is wrong about this, per se. For all we know he is right—his prescience is never proven wrong. This is the problem the book seems to present us with: we have no way of knowing what could have been, because Muad’Dib has already set us on a certain path. Among the many confusing paragraphs of fancy footwork that attempt to explain what Paul and Alia’s prescience is like, there are some choice sentences that heavily imply or even outright state that the lines between predicting and creating the future are blurry at best. The characters see an endless amount of possible futures, and they choose one to follow. Executing their visions through the supreme power they already hold as rulers of the universe, they make that future so.
By the end of the book, Paul knows all, and everything (basically) goes his way. In imagery so beautifully simple and poetic, Paul literally becomes blinded to anything that’s not his prescient vision of the future. As part of the path he’s chosen to put the universe on, he allows himself to become blinded by an atomic weapon, yet chooses not to regain his sight through the artificial eyes readily available to him. There are plot reasons for doing this—the Fremen generally distrust Tleilaxu eyes, and Paul being blind at the end of the story provides an impetus for and important ramifications of his decision to walk into the desert to be eaten by Shai-Hulud, as is Fremen custom for the blind. But at the same time, it can’t be ignored that Paul, in his arrogance and perhaps cowardice, simply does not care to see the real world any longer. He now can only see his vision of the future, which he does in an awe-inspiring fashion, getting up from the blast with empty sockets yet seeming unperturbed. He “sees” perfectly through his prescient vision, every detail down to the atom being what he has already seen as an oracle thousands of times. His crushing despair—feeling like a slave to a prescient path he is forced onto—is now amplified tenfold, as he already knows every second of what is about to occur and what he is about to do at any moment. He is literally blinded to anything that is not what he has already chosen to happen, the exact path that he has willed into existence through years of planning as god emperor.
This was stunning, and to me, very clear symbolism. No one is the villain of their own story. We’re often placed in shitty positions and we try to make what seems like our best decision available. Anyone in a position of power over you will probably tell you this. Ask your boss after the layoffs. Or the rich—they generally accept that they are simply playing a game that they did not create, though they’ve won it. Humanity’s rulers have all had their own reasons that they justified their actions with—chief of which being that they are the best ones to make the decisions. Others may make the situation worse, and worst of all, then they wouldn’t be the ones in power. Now, when faced with the universe-wide significance of the decisions made in the Dune saga, the mind-bending horrors of intragalaxy trade and warfare, I suspect many would simply relinquish the role, they’d bow out. It’s a dirty game, and the only way to win is by not playing, after all. But if you were bred and trained to assume such a role, and you truly believed that you were doing the least terrible thing possible, what would you do?
Reading the books, particularly the second, I often got the feeling that Paul was thinking in these terms. From the moment he killed Feyd-Rautha and told the emperor that he expected no less than total submission, it was clear to me that protecting his position of power was at least slightly more important to him than the final outcome of his reign, than his stated intentions to avoid jihad. He rightfully finds the powers that be in his world abhorrent, but even more so he resents them for all they’ve done to put him in this position. This is personal. He wishes more than anything to not be under their thumb, as they had planned him to be. It’s all about control. I see this in his cowardly decision to martyr himself at the end of Dune Messiah. He is a man with many reasons to kill himself, that’s clear, but he specifically did not want to do so lest he become a martyr. This was a consistent theme in both books. He repeatedly said that he instead needed to discredit himself if he was to have any hope of removing his messiah status and ending the jihad. But his decision to walk into the desert is clearly stated to only further his godhood, pulling together more support for him and thus ensuring Alia’s and eventually his children’s ascension to the throne. The Atreides line continues, if nothing else, for better them than the Bene Gesserit, or the other Landsraad houses, or the Tleilaxu. The Atreides line continues, thank the lord.
He makes this final decision not because it is required by the path he sees for the best outcome (as far as we know, at least), but in what seems to be his first moment of free will in the book, after the prescient vision he felt enslaved to was suddenly ended by an unseen split in the path (the successful birth of an oracular twin son in addition to his already predicted daughter). It is purely cowardice (though understandable), not a prescient calculation. It is a punting of responsibility to the next generation (as he exclaims in ecstasy, they finally don’t need him anymore). He can rest easy knowing that an Atreides will be in control rather than the old powers, and that his children will have to bear the burden of the horrors of the jihad and the eventual-maybe-hopefully-probably-end to the terrors. As Alia would go on to say in the final pages of the book, Paul had effectively fixed all the possible futures onto and through him, focusing them like a lens. All possibilities converged on Paul and his actions, and all futures exploded out from him. He could not be avoided. He controlled it all.
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