Dune – The End

The way Frank Herbert ends his seminal science fiction novel seemed a little strange to me when I first read it.  (I’m not sure how much I can really talk about without giving the whole ending away…reader, beware of spoilers but I’ll do the best I can to avoid ruining the important stuff.)  Partly, the odd nature of the ending comes from the fact that “Dune” is the first installment of a much longer and more complicated series.  Like any series, the end of the first book feels like…well, the end of the beginning, and there are pretty big openings left for future books to fill.

And that’s all well and good. 

But in this case even Frank Herbert’s way of punctuating the end of a series opener seems a little odd, even for series openers.  I won’t say it’s anticlimactic, because it’s not.  And the more I thought about the book’s ending the more I appreciated Herbert’s finesse.  He wraps up the story nicely, but there are a handful of kind of big events that not only go unresolved, but unmentioned!  I  It seemed strange to me at first, but the more I thought about it, the more brilliant and appropriate the ending became. 

There are a few reasons:


The book ends on a tone of family drama instead of political intrigue or conquest. 

This is huge.  Most books will always do a call-back to a character’s humble origins at the end of some epic struggle, and “Dune” is no exception.  But Frank Herbert doesn’t give Paul Atreides the last line of the book.  Ultimately, the overarching conflict of the book is Paul’s, but the one that has the most resolution is Jessica’s.  And it’s not even the most obvious conflict of Jessica’s that gives the ending its emotional basis. 

Frank Herbert deals with the Bene Gesserit breading program, the Harkonnen heir, and the Fremen jihad as he leads up to the last few pages of the novel.  But the conversation Herbert leaves his readers with takes place between Jessica and Chani, wherein Jessica explains her relationship with Paul’s father, finally accepts Paul’s relationship with Chani, and resolves the regrets she’s had over her own relationship with Duke Leto.  It’s a touching shift in Jessica’s character, made even more so because the story that is given final resolution is Duke Leto and Jessica’s.


Herbert foregrounds the reader experience he has been crafting from the very beginning.   


It’s so beautifully subtle that it makes the whole ending feel absolutely appropriate and organic to the story.  All along, chapters in the book have started with an odd future-historical account of them, which gives readers some prescience of their own as they read.  Also, in Jessica’s last few lines, Herbert brings even the structure of the book full circle.  Jessica says, almost off-handedly, that the Emperor’s daughter is rumored to have literary aspirations.  Jessica observes that she hopes it is the case, because “she’ll have little else.” 

Readers instantly understand the truth in Jessica’s words, because we’ve been reading the writings of the Emperor’s daughter at the beginning of every chapter.  It’s a brilliant move, because readers are ultimately left with a certainty in the events that will follow the book’s end.  While much of the impression Herbert leaves readers with is accomplished through vague implication, readers do come to understand with a great deal of clarity the dread and sadness which Paul has always felt for events which haven’t happened yet.      

Combine these two things, and what readers get is subtle but well-constructed and interesting ending to an intriguing and compelling series beginning.  Frank Herbert manages to end “Dune” by giving readers an even greater insight and emotional connections to the characters and world of the book.