All a dream? WAS End of Harry Potter series.

[bluesqueak]

No: HPFGUIDX 44770

"And so Harry woke up and found it had all been a dream."

ARRGH! NO! BAD-JKR ELF! Go bang your head on the oven door 
immediately!

No.

Absolutely not.

No, no, no, no, NO.

Errm... no, I don't think 'it was all a dream' is a terribly good 
ending. Did you guess that?

When JKR said that she didn't believe in magic, I suspect that she 
meant that by the end of Book 7, we'll know that Harry's side has not 
won because they are better at 'magic' than Voldemort's side.

'Magic' solves nothing. 'Magic' will not bring Harry's parents back 
to life. 'Magic' will not make Snape or the Dursley's more 
likable. 'Magic' is basically 'technology' - useful, but ultimately a 
tool, and not a solution. 

Harry's side will win because they have people who are willing to 
sacrifice themselves and their lives to defeat Voldemort. Ron may 
sacrifice his life in the same way he 'sacrificed' himself as knight 
in the PS/SS chess game. Sirius may return to Azkaban to protect 
Harry. We might discover that Snape has spent years in a job he 
loathes because only by staying at Hogwarts and working with 
Dumbledore can he help defeat Voldemort. We might discover that the 
reason Lily didn't run was because she spent her last seconds trying 
to find some way of stopping Voldemort killing Harry.

None of the above requires 'magic'. Muggles display a willingness to 
fight evil whatever the cost. JKR does not have to use a 'cop-out' 
ending to convince readers that they don't *need* to be a wizard like 
Harry Potter - just try and be a *person* like Harry [or Ron, or 
Hermione, or select-character-of-choice].

Going to Hogwarts will solve all your problems, kids? Heck, judging 
by Books 1 to 4, you'll just end up with a bunch of *equally* serious 
problems. Harry's escaped from under the stairs to discover a 
wonderful world of prejudice, unfairness, hypocrisy, fraud, injustice 
and evil. That's some escapist fantasy he's having. By the end of 
Book Five I'd think he's likely to *want* to wake up from it. 
Unlovely as the Dursley's are, they seem to be slightly better than 
Azkaban.

No, the 'dream' ending could only really work if there was some twist 
to it: I think CS Lewis twisted the 'dream' ending in The Last 
Battle, by having his characters realise that not only was Narnia a 
dream, but this world was equally a dream.

It could work, for example, if the sacrifice Harry had to make was to 
not only give up the WW, but always afterwards think it had only 
existed in his imagination - that ending has also been used a lot, 
but JKR is a good enough writer to pull it off.

So, the last lines of Book 7?

'Harry turned and saw a tall, red-headed young man. 'Funny', thought 
Harry, 'he looks like someone I once saw in a dream.'

The young man looked at Harry as if he was searching for someone he 
didn't expect to find. Then he smiled.

"Hallo, Harry." he said. "I bet you were glad to lose your scar."

Pip!Squeak