47 pages • 1 hour read
Frank HerbertDune Messiah
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 21-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary
To reach Paul’s plane of prescience, Alia ingests an enormous dose of spice. She looks for the father of her children in the ensuing vision, frustrated by her inability to see him.
Hayt finds Alia deep under the influence of spice and calls medics, fearing she has taken a lethal dose. Alia refuses medical help, determined to experience her vision. Hayt stays with her and Alia senses that he loves her; Hayt does not deny it. Alia’s vision reveals that Hayt is both “danger and salvation” for Paul (291), and that Paul is attempting to coalesce all timelines into one potential future but is not sure why.
She sees that “deification is a prison enclosing him” (293), and that Paul will not be able to bear living in a world where Chani is dead, and he is a god. Alia sees that someday she will give birth to a prescient child like herself.
Chapter 22 Summary
Paul travels to Sietch Tabr, deep in the Fremen desert, with Chani, who will soon give birth despite only being five months pregnant. Chani finds the company Paul has summoned to them strange: Edric, Scytale (still in disguise as Lichna), Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Alia, Hayt, Bijaz, Stilgar, and Stilgar’s wife Harah. Looking over the landscape while waiting for Paul to finish imperial business, Chani sees a giant sandworm and feels hate for the new water that has changed the desert (water is lethal to the worms). Chani considers how the presence of outsiders and Paul’s rise to power have changed her home, seeing children with “muddy feet”—an impossibility in the Sietch’s arid past. Hayt hurries Chani inside when a dangerous sandstorm brews, and Chani goes into labor. Hayt’s concern for Paul should anything happen to Chani causes him to realize that Bijaz implanted him with “a compulsion.”
Chapter 23 Summary
Hayt finds Paul standing outside in the night and tells him about the compulsion. Paul tells Hayt that there will be no violence, appealing to Duncan Idaho within Hayt and causing the ghola great distress. Paul and Hayt hear Chani calling “Usul…Uuuussssuuuulll…” as she dies of birth complications due to Irulan’s poison. He recalls breakfast with Chani on the day they left for the desert, when Chani was moved to tears by Paul wearing his old House Atreides uniform.
Paul speaks the command for Hayt’s compulsion—“She is gone” (311)—and Hayt involuntarily draws his knife. Paul quotes his grandfather, and the memory of the old Duke Atreides inspires Hayt to overpower his compulsion and regain his identity as the loyal Duncan Idaho. His Tleilaxu mentat and Zensunni conditioning help him psychologically bear resurrection from death.
An aide informs Paul that Chani bore twins, a boy and a girl. Paul is shocked as he only foresaw his daughter. He goes to the birthing room, calling it “the place where the moon fell” in his grief (315). Paul’s oracular vision fails, leaving him truly blind. Alia arrives, having discovered that Lichna is really Scytale. Paul ignores her, preoccupied by the fact that his son indicates that “This is another world” (318).
Scytale bursts in and threatens the newborn twins with a knife. Scytale offers Paul a ghola of Chani; Duncan’s memory retrieval was intended to prove the possibility of resurrecting Chani fully as well. Paul wonders what traumatic experience would be required to make Chani recover her memories if Duncan had to nearly kill Paul to recover his.
Paul senses that his children were born with prescience and full consciousness. He can see from his son’s point of view in his cradle. Watching himself from across the room, Paul kills Scytale as the Face Dancer negotiates terms with Alia. Duncan kills Bijaz after the dwarf repeats the ghola offer. Paul names his son Leto II after his father and names his daughter Ghanima, meaning “spoil of war.” Paul, overwhelmed by “infinite possibilities,” loses his prescient vision again, presumably forever.
Chapter 24 Summary
Declaring that the “Future no longer needs his physical presence” (328), Paul exiles himself into the desert according to Fremen tradition, to either be eaten by the sandworms or killed in a sandstorm. As Paul leaves, Stilgar insists that he was truly Fremen, and Duncan insists Paul was truly an Atreides. Duncan observes that Paul’s self-imposed exile both ensures Fremen loyalty and prevents his total deification. The Bene Tleilax and Bene Gesserit plot has failed, the Qizarate has exposed its hypocrisy, and power is truly consolidated within Paul’s empire.
Alia, now regent of the empire until the infant Leto II comes of age, orders the deaths of the remaining traitors. Stilgar killed the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam as she predicted. Alia summons Duncan in her grief over Paul. She laments Paul’s choice to commit to his fate, even though “the rest of the universe would have come shattering down behind him” if Paul had chosen a different future (334). Alia tells Duncan she has saved Irulan, who commits her life to writing Paul’s history, realizing that she truly loved her husband after all. Alia and Duncan declare their love for one another.
Epilogue Summary
“The Ghola’s Hymn” describes how Paul, the “fool saint” and “oracle without eyes,” wanders eternally through the desert and time (337).
Chapters 21-Epilogue Analysis
Paul’s defeat of his enemies comes at the cost he predicted: He has ensured the survival of his dynasty but has lost his true love and abdicated his throne. Paul walks into the desert fully human, stripped of his powers and presumably soon to die. He has failed to become the savior of humanity he imagined himself to be but has also freed himself of the burden of the Jihad and the responsibility for all life in the universe. As Bronso of Ix indicated in the opening chapter, Paul’s prescience ultimately led to his downfall. Dismayed by the future he saw, Paul’s attempts to control fate make him incapable of recognizing any alternatives. The surprise birth of Paul’s son reminds him that other futures are still possible and provide Paul with the escape route from his own deification that he has been searching for. Knowing his children have inherited his prescient abilities, Paul does what he can to prepare them to take up his role as savior. The ending of the novel represents an ambivalent victory for Paul. He has defeated his enemies and escaped heroism at great personal loss, but his choice is far from the self-sacrifice expected of classical heroes. Paul’s victory lies in rejecting heroism and leadership.
The temptation to resurrect Chani nearly prevents Paul from this last effort to entrust humanity’s future to their children. The sophistication of the conspiracy against Paul is revealed as Duncan Idaho regains his identity and legitimizes Scytale’s offer to resurrect Chani. What seemed like the failure of the plot (Duncan does not kill Paul) was the success of an even more devious plan. By resisting, Paul maintains his own dynasty as the dominant force in the universe. Paul tells Hayt that he is “dying of prescience” (308), but his loss of prescience upon Chani’s death frees him to make new choices and resist the Tleilaxu temptation. Paul’s defeat of Scytale represents the climactic moment of the novel, as Paul accepts a new future he did not foresee and relinquishes his power.
Chapter 24 comprises the novel’s short denouement, as the other characters debate and grieve the nature of Paul’s exile. Like the prologue, the epilogue is presented as text from within the world of the novel rather than narration. “The Ghola’s Hymn” indicates both Duncan’s future role in the official religion of Paul’s dynasty and Paul’s enduring legend as a great oracle and “fool saint” whose own powers catalyzed rather than prevented his downfall.
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