Bang! You're dead

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 86608



Geoff:
For a couple of days, I have been thinking about, first, the way in 
which people from the same or similar backgrounds react in totally 
different ways and, second, the question of Harry needing to kill 
Voldemort to fulfil, as one poster put it, "that blasted prophecy".

My thoughts came into focus a little more when I went back to a book 
I have mentioned on a couple of previous occasions, "The Weirdstone 
of Brisingamen" by Alan Garner. I need to briefly outline a little of 
the plot because it is germane to my points re Harry.  It is one of 
two linked books, the other being "The Moon of Gomrath", both fairly 
short, being about 200pp each, published about 1960. Garner wrote a 
number of children's books around that time, all with magical themes. 
Weirdstone is based on an old legend set around Alderley Edge in the 
north of England, just south of Manchester and involves an overlap 
between a magical world and the real world and two children caught up 
in it. They have unknowingly come into possession of a powerful 
magical object – Firefrost, or the Weirdstone – and as a result meet 
Cadellin, who is a wizard of High Magic. They become enmeshed in a 
battle between High Magic and evil forces, led by a hooded and cowled 
villain Grimnir (not unlike a Dementor). The stone is stolen and they 
are involved in a plan to regain it and journey meet with Cadellin in 
a place of safety. He is not with them to begin with (sound 
familiar?) but when they come to a confrontation with Grimnir which 
could lead to a devastating outcome, Cadellin arrives and hurls a 
double edged sword to stop Grimnir who is injured and dies as a 
result. As he dies, Cadellin removes his hood and Grimnir is revealed 
to be his brother Govannon. He weeps
 "Oh, my brother! This is the 
peak of the sorrow of all my years. That it should come to this! And 
at my hand!"

I hadn't read this book for several years and had forgotten this 
section. Immediately, my mind connected with Harry's problem with 
Voldemort and the need apparently to kill him. In Weirdstone, 
Cadellin had to stop Govannon by the quickest means available at that 
point and, in so doing killed him, not necessarily intentionally. 
Perhaps this is a way in which we might see Harry dealing with 
Voldemort – by killing him in the middle of a confrontation to stop 
him.

On a second thought, in over 30 years of teaching teenagers and with 
a continuing connection with boys' club work in my church, I have 
often been surprised by the way in which two members of the same 
family can go in totally different ways as a  reaction to similar 
events.

Out of this story, Cadellin and Govannon were brothers brought up 
together yet who decided to follow different paths, one choosing to 
descend into evil, the other following the path of High Magic. In the 
Potterverse, Tom Riddle and Harry share similar backgrounds. Both are 
orphaned at an early age; both have deprived and unhappy childhoods 
as a result. At some point both receive letters from Hogwarts and 
thus discover their wizarding heritage and either become, or seem 
destined to become, powerful wizards. And there, their destinies 
diverge. Tom allows hatred and envy to govern what he does and 
descend into the Dark Arts to become Voldemort while Harry revels in 
his new found life and freedom and friends and opens up as an outward 
looking young man. OK, so he is flawed like any human being but with 
a generally positive view. I was also reminded of Boromir and Faramir 
in LOTR. Boromir is not basically evil, but the seductive influence 
of the Ring draws him towards evil – with the best of intentions – 
and he finally realises that it has betrayed him and led indirectly 
to his death. Faramir is sensible enough to see the corrosive effect 
of the Ring o n personalities and is wise enough to let Frodo go.

This brings us backs inevitably to Dumbledore's oft quoted 
remarks: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far 
more than our abilities."

(COS "Dobby's Reward" p.245 UK edition)

Voldemort has become loveless, self-seeking, power-hungry, quite 
prepared to destroy an innocent such as Ginny to achieve his own 
ends. Harry, although he displays most of the varying emotions of a 
growing boy, has at base an empathy for others. Look at his reaction 
to being told about the Longbottoms

"He often got sympathy from strangers for being an orphan but as he 
listened to Neville's snores, he thought that Neville deserved it 
more than he did. Lying in the darkness Harry felt a rush of anger 
and hate towards the people who had tortured Mr. and Mrs. Longbottom
.


.it was Voldemort, Harry thought, staring up at the canopy of his 
bed in the darkness, it all came back to Voldemort
 he was the one 
who had torn these families apart, who had ruined all these lives
."

(GOF "The Third Task" pp.527/8 UK edition)

Despite the anger and the hormones, he is basically a very moral 
person; here perhaps is where we might see Harry seeing the need to 
kill Voldemort. It harks back to what I said recently, if I might 
quote my own message 86237 again:

I can agree with Christians in the Confessing Church in Germany who 
were prepared to join in the 1944 conspiracy against Hitler because 
it seemed to be the only thing to stop the Nazis going into oblivion 
and pulling the whole country down with them. But there is a 
difference between those folk who allow themselves to be drawn in the 
direction of the evil which they fight and replace one form of 
oppression with another - Communist Russia for example - with those 
who reluctantly take that path because they echo Luther's words "Here 
I stand, I can do no other".

Geoff