Dec 23, 2009

Dune | Literary Qualities

Paul is a charismatic leader who can foresee some of the results of his actions. However, a character's ability to know the future presents significant problems for an author attempting to maintain suspense within the narrative. Often a writer will solve the problem by having the future-seeing character foresee a terrible doom; tension is then created by the struggle against that impending doom. Sometimes the struggle is complicated by characters who refuse to believe the prophesies. This happens to the prophetess Cassandra in Homer's Iliad, where readers know something that most...