Harry's curiosity/ambiguity

[linman6868 at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 13825

::delurking nervously for the first time::

Going to retrace my steps to a thread that piqued me before the 
shipper deluge...  :)

Harry's curiosity seems to be most eager when he comes into contact 
with people who knew what his parents were like as people.  By 
talking to them, Harry can glean a little knowledge-by-acquaintance 
of them.

Harry's attitude toward his parents' death-story, OTOH, seems to 
consist mainly of overwhelmed feelings at first.  When his curiosity 
about the story begins to kick in by the end of SS/PS, his attitude 
becomes the same as that which Dumbledore asks him to adopt toward 
the Mirror of Erised:  don't go looking for it, but be ready for it 
when you meet it.  

This attitude, though not his trust in Dumbledore, is put to a severe 
test in PoA when he discovers that several people whom he sees every 
day know a great many more details about his parents' death than he 
does, and have never volunteered any of it to him.  His resulting 
frustration and anger are temporarily relieved in the encounter with 
Sirius, but I suspect that if he hadn't been subsequently distracted 
by scar pains and worry about Sirius and the Triwizard Tournament, 
that frustration would have resurfaced.

I'm continually impressed with JKR's ability to draw a fine thread of 
tension like this over four books--it took Harry till PoA to have a 
real outburst of anger, and as yet there's been no real opportunity 
for him to really weep; the emotional power of such scenes hasn't 
been wasted early in the series, and it reinforces our interest in 
the story.

I'm so happy to have discovered a great place to lurk in on awesome 
discussions of HP; none of my friends have read the books yet and 
I've been dying.

Lisa, scuttling like a spider back into lurkdom