Question RE: new info from jkr.com

[ginnysthe1]

This is Kim.  Hope it's OK my joining this conversation for a bit. I 
just joined the OT Chatter group and thought your posts were 
interesting.

In Carol's post, she quoted Yb:

" ... See, the HP series is written in third-person limited point-of-
view. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it 
means that the narrator is not in the story; he/she is an objective 
viewer of all events. But, the narrator is limited to what Harry can 
see/hear/experience. There are very few times where we depart from 
this line of writing, and all of them occur during PS/SS."

Then Carol responded:

"Yes, I know. I've posted about half a dozen times regarding the 
limited omniscient narrator on the main list, mostly in response to 
people who persist in calling Harry the narrator. A technicality, 
maybe, but it's important to our understanding of the series. And 
there *are* other instances when JKR departs from Harry's (for 
example in GoF when the narrator reports that, unknown to Harry, 
Neville is also lying awake). And I wouldn't call this 
narrator "objective" since his/her observations are usually colored 
by Harry's. The key word is "limited." Such narrators are unreliable 
because they are limited by what the POV character experiences, 
knows, and believes. If the POV character is misinformed, so is the 
reader. (JKR cleverly uses the mind link with Voldemort to escape the 
limitations of this POV, and of course she can't use Harry's POV in 
SS/PS chapter one or the scene where Hermione sets Snape's robes on 
fire.)"

Kim comments:

Not having been a literature major (but having been a voracious 
reader most of my life), I wondered how you could tell specifically 
when the POV changes from being limited to Harry's (written in third 
person) to just the omniscient narrator's POV (also written in third 
person).  My sense is that JKR inserts the omniscient narrator's POV 
at various and unpredictable times, but that it happens relatively 
often, not rarely.  And I know she gets really specific about Harry's 
POV when she writes things like "Harry thought his head was going to 
burst" [not a direct quote but I think lines like that can be found] 
and so I would agree that those particular instances (which happen 
pretty often) are possibly unreliable in that they are a report of 
Harry's direct experience of events.  And of course there's a lot of 
dialogue in the books between Harry and other characters that I think 
is reliable, not just a report of what Harry thought the other 
characters said.  Whether you can trust what they say is a different 
matter.  Taking a liberty here, I would call the POV in the books 
something more like 3rd person omniscient "Harry-focused" vs. "Harry-
limited" if that makes any sense.  What I mean is that Harry is the 
central focus of the story, the story revolves around him, and the 
narrator tends to be limited by that as to which events are covered 
and which aren't.  But the narration isn't necessarily filtered 
through Harry's direct experience of it.  It's just *focused* on 
Harry.  And of course I agree (and never thought otherwise) that 
Harry is not the narrator.  The it would be written in first person 
(as Harry), wouldn't it?

Another example I found of omniscient POV (not limited to Harry's) 
outside of the PS/SS and GoF examples you've given is the very first 
chapter of GoF which includes the scenes, among others, with Frank 
Bryce, Wormtail, and Voldemort in the Riddle House in Little 
Hangleton.  This chapter wasn't just a detailed report of Harry's 
dream (which wakes him up at the end of the chapter), because there 
are too many details that he couldn't have known beforehand in order 
for them to have been in his dream.

I've decided that the narrator in the HP books is generally reliable 
insofar as you can rely on JKR for consistency in her writing.  I 
mean, sometimes when the narrator seems unreliable, it may simply be 
due to JKR having gotten her "facts" mixed up.

Food for thought, FWIW.

Cheers, Kim