Azkaban and dementors (WAS: The character I pity most)

[ssk7882]

No: HPFGUIDX 35615

Judy wrote:

> Even without an afterlife, though, I still think some experiences 
> are so awful that one would be better off dead.  I think about this 
> whenever the topic of Azkaban comes up.  It seems to me that 
> throwing people in Azkaban for life is far crueler than executing 
> them.  

I agree.  And it would seem that it not uncommonly turns out to be
effectively a death sentence, anyway.  Sirius claims that a good 
number of the prisoners lose their will to live and perish: 
presumably they stop eating and then just waste away.  Death by 
despair.  Horrible.

Before the release of GoF, my friends and I found ourselves often
wondering whether Rowling really meant for Azkaban and the dementors 
to be quite as horrifying as we had found them in PoA.  In many ways, 
I was very pleased by all of the "the dementors are our natural 
allies" plot hints in GoF, as well as by Sirius' tale in Padfoot 
Returns and the behavior of people in the various Pensieve scenes, 
because all of these indicated to me that indeed, we *had* been meant 
to read them as every bit as dreadful as they are.

> Perhaps Dumbledore agrees, and that is one reason why he's so 
> opposed to the dementors?  

This seems strongly implied, to be sure.

I also find myself wondering about the practice on purely pragmatic
grounds.  Not all of the prisoners in Azkaban are there for life.
There are lesser sentences: Crouch's recommendation for Ludo Bagman's
sentence was cut off by the mutterings of the crowd, but the phrasing
indicates that it was to be a finite imprisonment; Hagrid is sent 
there for a short spell.  Yet in PoA, Lupin claims that time spent
in the company of the dementors tends to make people, well...inhumane.
He claims that they render people soulless and evil.  

I can't help but wonder if this really makes them the wisest choice
for guards of a prison to which criminals are sometimes incarcerated
for finite periods of time.  It seems rather self-defeating, don't
you think?  What does somebody who has managed to survive their
ten-year sentence, for example, emerge as (assuming that they had
neither Sirius' knowledge of his own innocence nor his animagus
abilities to help sustain them)?  For that matter, how much of 
younger Crouch's black and inhumane and certainly soulless-seeming 
malice might have been a by-product of having been rescued from near-
death-by-dementor-despair?

Oh, it just seems like such an obviously bad idea to me.  It's 
like anti-rehabilitation or something.

> I was very surprised when Peter was *happy* that Harry planned to 
> send him to Azkaban, rather than let Sirius and Remus kill him.  

I don't think that he was.  He was overwhelmingly relieved not to be 
slaughtered on the spot, but I don't think that he was at all happy 
about it.  I always read more than a touch of veiled hostility in
that fawning "it's more than I deserve."  Is there any real gratitude
there at all?  There's certainly genuine self-loathing.  But I think 
that mainly there's an enormous deal of passive-aggression underlying 
that statement.  Mystic bond or no mystic bond, Pettigrew was 
thinking dark dire thoughts about Harry when he said that, I'd be 
willing to bet, and I'm sure that they got even darker a moment
later, when Harry commented that "if anyone deserves that place, he 
does."

> If it were me, I'd be saying "Please!  Kill me now!  Anything other 
> than the dementors!"  

Well, where there's life, there's hope.  Dementors scare me witless,
but I still don't think that I'd ever be able to ask for certain
death over the prospect of some *future* agony.  The dementors weren't
standing right there in front of him.  Remus and Sirius were.

And, of course, he did escape.  So he called it right.


-- Elkins