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Religion, Morality, and Tradition
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Handful of Dust, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Listless socialite Brenda is duped by fortune-tellers twice in A Handful of Dust: once in her first meeting with John Beaver, whose believably serious opening quickly gives way to a ludicrous joke-fortune; and once by Mrs. Northcote, a foot-sole-reading scam artist who gives the same vague prophecy to all of Brenda’s friends. Brenda never discovers the sham behind Mrs. Northcote’s grave façade. Beaver’s reading, on the other hand, was a trivial prank meant to be exposed immediately, and yet it unwittingly contains a distorted but comprehensive account of the plot to come: “Oh yes... there is going to be a sudden death which will cause you great pleasure and profit. In fact you are going to kill someone. […] then you are going to go on a long journey across the sea, marry six dark men and have eleven children, grow a beard and die.”
The recurrence of fortune-telling, and the random and improbable truthfulness of Beaver’s insincere prophecy, signal the importance of chance and fate in the novel. Tony’s disingenuous and immediately forgotten weekend invitation to Beaver sets in motion the end of his marriage. A motorcycle backfiring startles a horse and robs young John Andrew of his life. Random incidents with devastating consequences seem to control this world. In the novel’s last third, Tony reckons with his lifelong passivity and attempts to assert agency over his fate with a daring voyage to the Amazon—only to arrive at the most random and improbable doom imaginable, stuck reading to the illiterate Mr. Todd on his remote ranch. In Waugh’s vision, earthly life’s seemingly incomprehensible brutality is a fact that societies have lived with forever, in the face of which religion traditionally provided comfort, guidance, and meaning. For Waugh, Christianity was the revealed truth, and it reconciled humans to the uncontrollable winds of fortune with clear rules for this life and a promise of one to come. Through satirical portrayals of fortune-telling and hare-brained Amazonian adventures, Waugh argues that, lacking a basis of objective truth in their lives, people will regress to ever more ludicrous behaviors in doomed attempts to control their fate.
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Chance and Fate ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Chance and Fate appears in each chapter of A Handful of Dust. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Chance and Fate Quotes in A Handful of Dust
Below you will find the important quotes in A Handful of Dust related to the theme of Chance and Fate.
Chapter 2: English Gothic—I
Quotes
When Tony came back they were sitting in the library. Beaver was telling Brenda's fortune with cards. “... Now cut to me again,” he was saying, “and I'll see if it's any clearer... Oh yes... there is going to be a sudden death which will cause you great pleasure and profit. In fact you are going to kill someone. I can't tell if it's a man or a woman... yes, a woman... then you are going to go on a long journey across the sea, marry six dark men and have eleven children, grow a beard and die.”
“Beast. And all this time I've been thinking it was serious.”
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Chapter 3: Hard Cheese on Tony
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She hit him and the horse collected himself and bolted up the road into the village, but before he went one of his heels struck out and sent John into the ditch, where he lay bent double, perfectly still.
Everyone agreed that it was nobody’s fault.
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She frowned, not at once taking in what he was saying. “John… John Andrew… I… Oh thank God…” Then she burst into tears.
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“But it’s not true, is it?”
“Yes, I’m afraid it is. Everyone has known for some time.”
But it was several days before Tony fully realized what it meant. He had got into a habit of loving and trusting Brenda.
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Chapter 5: In Search of a City
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“You’re the explorer, aren’t you?”
“Yes, come to think of it, I suppose I am.”
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“From now onwards the map is useless to us,” said Dr. Messinger with relish.
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