End of Harry Potter Series

[GulPlum]

No: HPFGUIDX 44724

At 22:00 30/09/02 +0000, bohcoo wrote:

<snip>

>There are numerous references like that throughout the books about
>this just being a dream, that was only a dream, Harry expecting to
>wake and find he had only dreamed this or that had happened, etc.
>
>It would be a tidy way to end the series -- but I hope I am wrong,
>don't you?

snazzybird has already replied to that, suggesting that you read the 
discussion which followed darkthirty's similar thesis last month (although 
yours is considerably less verbose)! :-)

I didn't participate in that discussion here, but shortly afterwards he 
posted a slightly abbreviated form of his thesis in alt.fan.harry-potter 
(my main HP hangout), to which I posted a detailed reply. He said that was 
going to comment on my reply there, but he never got around to it. Since 
that time, he seems to have disappeared (both from afh-p and here).

In brief, I'll summarise my own view that I find it deeply unsatisfying for 
Hogwarts et al to be nothing but a boy's dream. My main issue (which I 
don't think anyone else made here, and I don't have the time to go through 
the archives to check right now) with this thesis is that the Potterverse 
isn't the kind of fantasy world a downtrodden boy under the stairs would 
create.

Firstly, and for me most importantly, boyhood fantasies revolve around 
being a great hero. Harry in the books (at least to date) is very largely 
an accidental hero, and he does not relish being thought of as anything but 
ordinary. He has no special abilities; in fact, he is average or 
below-average in just about every respect, and we are constantly reminded 
of this fact (he's small, studying doesn't come easily to him, etc) and in 
fact the only thing at which he has proven to be unnaturally adept is at 
summoning a Patronus, i.e. his father. Psychologically speaking, the 
Potterverse is quite simply much to complex to be the fantasy of a teenage 
boy.

Furthermore, not only do his adventures not start with him attempting to 
save his friends, but he actively (though not deliberately) puts them in 
danger; only *then* does he attempt to save them. And he is unable to save 
them without help, be it from caring adults or those friends.

I also find the Latin and constant references to Greek mythology to be far 
too erudite for an ordinary child being brought up in England on the cusp 
of the 21st century.

Of course, if these are the fantasies not of a downtrodden boy under the 
stairs but a well-educated, well-looked after child, then *why* is he 
creating this fantasy? Children create imaginary worlds to escape 
real-world problems around them (not only children - most adult writers 
address the problems they see around them in their work!), so a happy child 
would not imagine the Potterverse. And if the fantasy world *is* that of a 
downtrodden child, the final "return to reality" would need to explain just 
why he's downtrodden and why nobody likes him. Accepting the Potterverse as 
is, Harry's treatment by the Dursleys is directly connected to the 
"fantasy" elements.

All in all, then, the series' outcome as nothing but a long dream would be 
a major cop-out for me, and particularly hollow. The "moral" of the story 
would also lose a considerable amount of its impact: "it's all a dream, it 
doesn't matter"!

On the other hand, I fear that JKR just might be going down a road just 
like this. Sorry, I can't find it right now, but a couple of weeks ago I 
was looking for something else in the archives of JKR's interviews, when I 
was shocked (in this context) to read JKR's reply to a question along the 
lines of "do you believe in magic?". In her answer, she said something like 
"no, I don't, and that will be very clear once people have had the chance 
to read all seven books". Someone better than I at searching the archives 
may be able to produce the exact quote, but the impression I got was that 
at the end of the series, the wizarding world will be shown to be non-existant.

I just hope I completely misunderstood what she was trying to say. :-)