Questions and ponderings--the dementor's kiss

[smokyant41]

No: HPFGUIDX 41032

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Richelle Votaw" <rvotaw at i...> wrote:

> I'm really confused now.  Is it the good thoughts or the bad 
thoughts that the dementors feed on?

It's the good memories. In PoA10, Lupin tells Harry:

"Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. 
They... drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around 
them.... Get too near a dementor and every good feeling, every happy 
memory will be sucked out of you. If if can, the dementor will feed 
on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself... soulless 
and evil. You'll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of 
your life. And the worst that happened to you, Harry, is enough to 
make anyone fall off their broom."

Later on, when Sirius is talking about how he got out of Azkaban, he 
says that the need to avenge himself and the Potters on Pettigrew 
became an obsession that kept him alive. It wasn't a happy thought, 
so the dementors couldn't deprive him of it, and it allowed him to 
eventually work up the energy to escape.

So basically, the dementors get off on two things: depriving a person 
of all their happy memories and making them as depressed or depraved 
as they possibly can. Their name indicates that: they slowly rob a 
person of his/her sanity (although with the exception of Sirius) by 
reducing them to hatred, despair, and madness, and then possibly 
taking their very soul. What fun!

Richelle also wrote:

>But if it's the good memories they're after, he hasn't got that 
many.  He would be more of a snack, not a feast.  I'm sure he had
no really good memories until Hogwarts, which only leaves 2 years 
worth of good memories, compared to his classmates 11+ years of good 
memories.

I think, though, that his happy memories are *very* happy memories, 
comparatively speaking (and happiness can never really be anything 
other than comparative). When talking of Harry's various triumphs -- 
his getting into Hogwarts, his first time on a broom, winning at 
Quidditch, winning the House Cup -- JKR typically uses superlative 
terms to describe the absolute depth of Harry's happiness, joy, and 
pride at what he's accomplished, and he has a memory happy enough to 
aid him in producing a Patronus.

Basically, Harry is appealing to the dementors on two levels: one, he 
has good memories they can suck out of him; two, his bad memories are 
so terrible, so unspeakable, that by forcing Harry to live with those 
memories and only those memories, the dementors can leave him with 
nothing but the memory of his parents' deaths, his life with the 
Dursleys, Voldemort... and things don't get much worse than that, 
which is what the dementors are going for.

Also, there has to be a certain satisfaction -- for a dementor, 
anyway, as well as for very sadistic people -- at so effectively 
destroying someone who has managed to build some bit of happiness on 
a foundation of despair. Harry's the antithesis of what they stand 
for: by all rights, he should be embittered, hate-filled, and evil 
with all that's happened to him, but instead, he's a decent, 
courageous, and loving human being. A dementor probably isn't able to 
stand that sort of cheek.

Sheesh... some people just don't learn to stay down :-)

HF.