Harry's lack of curiosity

[Amy Z]

No: HPFGUIDX 17747

Naama wrote:

> My feeling is that Harry, who went through a huge trauma, is 
reacting
> similarly. Yes, it's not quite the same, since he does want to see 
his
> parents and connect with them is some way. But he has barely reached
> that basic level of connectedness with his dead parents. It is still
> so emotionally raw for him. It seems quite reasonable to me that at
> this stage he would instinctively recoil from investigating his
> family's history.  
> Again, to return to Holocaust survivors - many started to think and
> talk and write and remember only thirty or fourty years after. And
> with that often came a renewed interest in familial history. It 
seems
> that first you have to come to terms with the fact that your family
> has been annihilated, and only then does it become bearable to think
> of the family when the people were alive.

Naama, this really helped me make sense of Harry.  Thanks.

It stimulated a few other thoughts.  Harry has had an explanatory 
story for his parents' absence for 10 years.  Whenever he thought of 
them, he had the car crash story--that's how he assimilated the 
difficult fact of having no parents.  Now that story has had to be 
thrown out, which is traumatic in itself.  On top of that, the story 
he now has (a) is more painful and frightening, (b) was told to him 
at the same time that he got a boatload of new stuff to process about 
himself, his family, and his world (i.e. the fact that the wizarding 
world exists, that he and they are wizards, that the Dursleys have 
been lying to him about his identity his entire life, etc.), and (c) 
is STILL incomplete.  

This last point must be really hard to take.  No wonder learning 
about Sirius Black's connection to them was such a blow; Harry 
thought he knew at last what happened to his parents, but then a year 
and a half later, he started to hear the details (literally, via the 
Dementors); shortly afterwards and by sheer accident, he learned a 
crucial part of the story that no one had seen fit to tell him.  A 
part, mind you, that even his worst enemy knew.  Right about now, he 
must be feeling as if he can't explore what happened to his parents 
without walking into a minefield.

I think my own response to the spilled secrets would be to grab 
Hagrid by the collar--uh, or whatever I could reach--and say "okay, I 
want the whole story now, and don't you dare leave out anything that 
I'm going to learn from *&#$%@ Draco Malfoy down the line, 
understand?"  But I can also understand the opposite reaction--to not 
want to ask any questions at all because heaven knows what other 
nasty secrets are hiding in that story.

Amy Z