POV in the Harry Potter books

[atelecky at mit.edu]

No: HPFGUIDX 10128


Hello, all--I am starting a thread to see what it might turn up; 
forgive me if the subject has been discussed before. 

The POV of the Harry Potter books is, I believe (shoving aside 
recent files on Numerical Methods in C, pushing the vast math stacks 
away, and blowing dust off my long disused mental file of literary 
terms) referred to as limited third person. I want to say that we 
never see anything that Harry does not see, but this is not strictly 
true; in the first chapter of SS or PS Harry is only a baby, and the 
narrator lingers briefly inside Vernon Dursley's head (please remind 
me of the term for that, someone! when a third person narrator is 
restricted to the POV of one character, and that character's thoughts 
and opinions come unannounced from the narrator's mouth. . . ). Then, 
once Dursley has gone to sleep, the narrator stays out of the minds of 
the characters while relating the circumstances under which the baby 
Harry was left with the Dursleys. Oddly, just as in the first chapter 
of GoF, we melt into Harry's point of view with a dream. And the first 
chapter of GoF is the second time that we see something "outside" 
Harry for a long period of time, with the narrator traveling for a 
while inside the head of Frank Bryce. 
Aside from these two most obvious times when the narrator "leaves" 
Harry, it is unclear when the narrator is relating a thought or an 
opinion of Harry's, and when the narrator is making a personal comment 
on the scene. At the beginning of all of the books, with the "Harry 
was in fact a most unusual yada yada yada fresh from his 
first/second/third year at blah blah blah" part, the narrator gives 
some background independent of Harry in a by no means objective 
fashion--sort of turning away from the little window into Harry's head 
to speak directly to the reader. The description of the Dursleys from 
the very beginning of SS is biting and sarcastic, before Harry's own 
opinion could ever come into it. 
There are many times in the Harry Potter books when a character seems 
dismissed out of hand or too harshly judged, Snape or Neville being 
examples. As the story progresses, however, both characters have 
evolved beyond what they started out promising to be. Many of us who 
have read DD and DS are hoping for similar things to come about with 
Draco (in an aside, I think it's quite likely; Draco is as yet only a 
child, and a child who has never seen the true nature of the Dark Side 
even if he has been raised by a father who follows Voldemort--I 
personally imagine that at some point, Draco will see some atrocity 
committed by his father's friends that will make him understand and 
hate what evil really is (such as in PoU)--but anyhow. . .). How much 
of our (erroneous) opinions come from the narrator's own comments? 
Does the narrator have an "omniscient, but still not going to tell 
you" quality, as if she stands back a bit from Harry's thoughts and 
opinions and knowledge of events even as she relates them? Where does 
the narrator allow herself to give an opinion, and is it always, 
sometimes, or never colored by or identical to Harry's perspective and 
opinion? Are we meant to trust this narrator, or believe that she is 
sometimes fallible?
Ideas?
Alexandra Telecky
atelecky at mit.edu