Dune 3

I finished the book, Dune, still with multiple questions that I was unable to find answers for. Examples:

I thought Paul, being the Kwisatz Haderach, could see into the past. Can he see into the the future too? If so, why the heck is he not all the wiser for it?

If the Baron wanted to take Arrakis, why did he give it to his nephew and not use it as a spice trading partner?

Whose side is the Emperor on????

You probably don’t know what the heck I am ranting about (and trust me, I don’t know either) but I have too much a heart to give away the ending to you. And you may be thinking, based on all of my posts, why you would ever read it, but I surprisingly would recommend it to you, as well as myself for a second reading. Going back with background knowledge and reading it through slower and more thoroughly, I would probably get more out of it. Specific pages and parts were actually pretty good, though the overall plot is hard to follow.

I think my main problem with reading this book is that I don’t understand war. From the last of my example questions, I think I can delve deeper into this misknowledge I have. When I think of war, I think of two sides. But that is not the case at all, and this is what Dune taught me. War is a complicated and unfair thing. There are allies and traitors and then people who just don’t want to get involved, and you have to deal with all of it whether you want to or not.

War is risky business; everyone in the book suffered from it, though my favorite character that shows this the most, in my opinion, is still Dr. Yueh. He doesn’t play a role in the second half of the book (spoiler alert! he dies) but he is basically the start of the whole thing. Without him, the Harkonnens would never have been able to attack the Atreides. Dr. Yueh was a spy sent to lead the Atreide family into a trap, yet he still was loyal to the Atreides. Why is this? Because the only reason why he agreed to work for the Harkonnens was because the other side of the deal was that his wife would be set free. The last we hear of Yueh is: “‘do not forgive me... I do not want your forgiveness. I already have enough burdens. What I have done was done without malice of hope of another’s understanding... By the time you read this, Duke Leto will be dead. Take consolation from my assurance that he did not die alone, that one we hate above all others died with him”(Herbert 188). Everything that Yueh did in the book was controlled by the drive to get his wife back/ to avenge her suspected death. Dr. Yueh was not on one side of this war. He did not care about the war. He cared only for himself. He both caused and was affected by this war, as was everyone else. And I think that is one message that Herbert was trying to get across.

In the other part of this book about Paul and the whole seeing of the future/past thing, I couldn’t help but thinking of Ender’s Game. Even though Paul is probably a young adult by the end of the book, it never really specified so I read it as if he was a tween, hence the comparison to Ender. Also, in a parallel with that, Paul was kind of forced into being something without being able to make the decision for himself. He later came to accept the fact that he had to be the Kwisatz Haderach, but this part of both books sort of give off the same theme: you are who you are, and you can’t really change that. You just have to accept it.
On a slightly specific and less important note, I just realized a piece of foreshadowing that I marked in the beginning of the book and did not really look into. It says, “Beside the painting lay a black bull’s head mounted on a polished board”(Herbert 48). This bull head is mounted in the dining hall when the family first gets to Arrakis. I researched what a bull normally symbolizes in literature and I got: rage, strength, uncontrollability, anger that has the potential for destruction. The last one is the key. This foreshadows all the events that are going to happen on Arrakis and to the Atreides. I think that the character Jessica also sensed this foreshadowing in the beginning but knew that it was inevitable.  

Thanks for listening to me talk about Dune. Stay tuned for more rambling about books. Up next: Riding the Bus with my Sister, by Rachel Simon.