Paul Atreides and the Trouble With Certainty
Every reader of these books has a favourite character, and for a great many readers that character is the boy from the first novel. It is worth noticing that this is the part of the story where the character stops being a person and starts being a function. He sees the future, and a person who sees the future is never surprised by his own life again.
That is the whole tragedy in one fact. The gift arrives as a gift and behaves as a curse. He is given visions of his mother's death and then of his father's, of a friend killed in the open desert, of a war that will swallow worlds. Each time the reader expects the future to bend away from what has been shown, it does not. Paul does not escape his own precognition; he walks into it, because by the time he understands it, being unable to escape it is the only shape his life has left.
The guidance he receives makes this worse, not better. The Sisterhood believes it is guiding him toward a purpose; his instructor believes she is protecting a valuable mind from a harsh education. Both of them are partly right and both are steering. A boy raised to be a tool for someone else's plan will, when the plan arrives, either refuse to be used or become the best tool ever made. The book lets him do both in sequence, and neither one is a failure.
So what happens when a reader's favourite character stops being surprised by his own life? The reader starts to feel the machinery. You notice that every person who loves him is also part of the design, that the visions arrive in useful order, that the world arranges itself around the prophecy with suspicious tidiness. A character we once followed for his surprises becomes something we watch being used.
I have never made peace with that completely. But I have stopped thinking it is a flaw in the writing. The first novel is not about a hero who learns to fight. It is about a young man discovering that his gift makes him the most reliable prisoner in the universe, and that the prisoners who accept their sentence do best by everyone except themselves.