Wednesday, July 20, 2005
(10:30 PM) | Anonymous:
*Spoiler Alert* My Wife's Theory on Harry Potter's Future.
I know that Harry Potter posts are not something our normal readers would hope to see at The Weblog. Hell, I'm not so sure Adam would want to see such a post here! Regardless, Harry Potter is a cultural phenomenon and deserves respect for that if nothing else and besides I'm really into it. One last warning before I continue: There are spoilers in this post so if you plan on reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince do not read this post. This post is intended for those who have read the book.So, Snape kills Dumbledore in one of the closing chapters. This scene is shocking as far as Children's Lit goes and I'm sure there will be some children very upset by this particular death. What's interesting though is the way Rowling doesn't hide the fact that Snape is a double agent. In the second chapter we see Snape making an unbreakable oath to assist Draco in whatever plot that Voldermort has assigned to him. We know that this oath will kill Snape if he doesn't keep his word and yet we also know that Dumbledore has expressed his trust in Snape in all the preceding books. This is an interesting experience for the reader, trying to decide what to think here. Do you express the same trust or do you read the rest of the book in the gripes of paranoia (much like Harry acts throughout the story)? At the end of the story I was left feeling betrayed since I decided to go the fairy tale route and trust Snape thinking he would sacrifice his life or something would come along to make the ending safe.
Hayley had a very different experience. At the end of the book she remains even more faithful to Dumbledore than any of the characters in the book itself. Essentially Hayley's theory is that Rowling is going to trick us again. We were first tricked into thinking that Snape was a double agent for The Order of the Phoenix only to have him murder Dumbledore. Hayley thinks we are going to find out that Snape was supposed to kill Dumbledore on Dumbledore's orders. Surprisingly there is plenty of textual evidence for this conjecture, but none that moves it past conjecture due to Rowling’s knack at throwing us off the trail by providing very ambiguous evidence that tends to be interpreted through Harry’s eyes. So, the argument between Dumbledore and Snape is meant to suggest that Snape may not want to be part of the Order anymore, but as we don’t have any other information it could have been an argument over Dumbledore’s insistence that Snape not allow Draco to kill him even if that means Snape must. While not obvious the final scene where Dumbledore pleads with Snape but we are not told what exactly he is pleading also remains ambiguous. We do assume that its for his life, but we assumed that the bad guy in the first book was Snape and not Quirrel who actually was. Rowling is very good at playing upon our assumptions to surprise us and this would be the ultimate surprise. The obvious "lesson" of the series has been that adults can not save you and so you must learn to deal with life, if Hayley is right there will be a strange counterbalance to this lesson with one that speaks of the faithfulness we owe to our elders who have come before us. It's a fine piece of literature ultimately.
