THE ROLE OF EPIGRAPHS AND PROLEPSIS IN THE COMPOSITION OF FRANK HERBERTʼS “DUNE”

This article examines the compositional structure of Frank Herbertʼs Dune (1965), the first novel of the Dune cycle, and argues that its form enacts its central theme of prescience. Composition is analysed on three levels: the macro-level of three books, four appendices, a glossary and a map; the meso-level of forty-eight chapters, each introduced by an epigraph; and the micro-level of point of view, interior monologue, leitmotif and chronotope. Drawing on the Uzbek theory of composition developed by Izzat Sulton and Dilmurod Quronov, Uspenskyʼs poetics of point of view, Genetteʼs accounts of prolepsis and the paratext, Bakhtinʼs chronotope, Campbellʼs monomyth and Palumboʻs fractal aesthetic, the study shows that Herbert systematically discloses outcomes before narrating them. The epigraphs attributed to Princess Irulan announce results in the voice of a later historian, Paulʼs visions bring the future into the heroʻs consciousness, and the conspirators' scenes give the reader more knowledge than the protagonists possess. Interest is thereby displaced from what will happen to how and why it happens, and the reader comes to occupy a position analogous to the heroʻs. The analysis also identifies a ring composition and what is termed a retrospective inversion of the epigraphic frame: the author of the epigraphs enters the story only in the final chapter, which recasts her history as the work of a wife in name only. The appendices turn a closed plot into an open historical world. The article also considers how an Uzbek reader receives the novelʼs Arabic-derived lexicon and hagiographic epigraphs.