OOP:Death--Point or Pointless?

[curly_of_oster]

No: HPFGUIDX 64545

There has been much discussion, here and elsewhere, as to 
the 'point' of Sirius' death.  A number of people have suggested 
that the 'point' is that there is no point.  That in real life, 
that's the way death is.  In her appearance at Royal Albert Hall 
(and before Stephen Frye gave away the identity of 'the death'), JKR 
confirms that this was at least some of what was going on.  She said 
that she was trying to show how sudden and arbitrary death can be.  
She pointed out that there is no deathbed scene, and that the whole 
thing seems almost accidental.  She noted that the characters are 
going into a war, and that in war, one moment you can be standing 
next to your friend, and the next the friend can be gone.  

I understand that all of this is true.  I understand that all of 
this is, indeed, demonstrated in the strange, almost non-event that 
is Sirius' death scene.  However, I must admit that if that's all 
she was getting at, I will be extremely disappointed, disillusioned 
even.  I say this in part because she's *already* shown us all of 
these things, at the end of GoF.  Cedric's death was sudden and 
arbitrary.  He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, at what was 
to prove to be the event that sets the upcoming war in motion.  He 
was standing there, next to Harry, and one minute he was alive, the 
next he was dead.  If that was JKR's point, it's already been made, 
and it seems like a rather flimsy explanation for the emotional 
devastation she's put on Harry, as well as many readers, with 
Sirius' death in OotP.

I do realize that if there *is* some greater purpose, she wasn't 
likely to explain that on stage, while being webcast around the 
globe.  However, it would have been reassuring to have some 
indication that killing off a character who has so much unfinished 
business, and whose death was about the cruelest thing to Harry I 
could think of to do, wasn't just an emotionally manipulative 
repetition of a lesson we, and Harry, have already learned.

Lisa