The howl of misery

[frantyck at yahoo.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 25660

Another tangent:

Near the end of GoF (Ch.36), Harry wakes up in the hospital wing a 
few hours after taking the sleeping draft to find people he knows 
standing around him. Dumbledore decides to raise the "old crowd" and 
leaves Harry with Hermione and the Weasleys. In safety, for the 
moment, Harry's experiences crowd in upon him, hours in an instant, 
and he must find a way to let himself release all the pent-up misery. 
Mrs Weasley sits down on Harry's bed and hugs Harry tight.

He never howls. Harry fights to hold it in, wishes Ron would turn 
away. Mrs Weasley and Harry break apart when Hermione catches Beetle-
Skeeter.

If there was a moving moment, that was it. Something in the reader is 
also fighting for release, some waterfall that ends the scary 
headlong rush of the last few chapters, indeed, of the entire book. 
Mrs Weasley's warm arms and tight embrace is forgiveness, safety, 
innocence, childhood, refuge, an ending, the brisk wet breeze that 
seeks to make up with the world after a storm... Harry cannot give 
himself to it. There's something almost guilty in the breaking apart.

Many questions here, most of which I won't ask: why doesn't Rowling 
allow the catharsis that most other authors would give both reader 
and protagonist? This sounds so British, schoolboys as little men 
with their own code of careless resolve masking entirely other 
emotions (read accounts of dealing with boarding-school life).

If there is a moment of the turning of innocence, this is it. Harry, 
and others, must swallow their anger and grief, to make of it a 
stronger will to defeat the enemy. This is when Harry becomes a man. 
There is no balance, no completion -- not yet.

That denial still bothers me awfully. It makes this book something 
other than a child's book. If there is one thing about children's 
books, it is that they do have balance, an ending, things work out 
and all is won, or all is forgiven. Not here.

What do you think?