[HPforGrownups] Who is the boy?

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 53951

On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, BoBaFeTT wrote:

> In the snippit from the begining of the book it says 
> 
>       Quote: 
>       . The only person left outside was a teenage boy who was lying
> flat on his back in a flowerbed outside number four.
> 
> Well seeing as he is seeing a boy it can't be Harry and I would think if
> it was Dudley he would have said the fat lump Dudley.
> 
> So who is this boy???

What makes you think *Harry* is seeing the boy in the flowerbed?  Or in
fact that anyone at all sees the boy in the flowerbed?  The quote doesn't
say "Harry saw that the only person left outside was a teenage boy..."  
It states simply that "The only person left outside was a teenage boy..."  
There's nothing about anyone *seeing* anyone else in that quote.  It just
states where the boy is, and that he was the only one outside.  I think we
are meant to assume the boy is Harry (Dudley certainly doesn't seem like
the lounging-in-a-flowerbed type), but there won't be any way to confirm
that until we get to see the rest of the text.

----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"