What if Harry dies?

[Melody]

No: HPFGUIDX 85095

Tonks asked:
>Some recent posting made me stop and think for a while this evening 
>as to what the reaction *would* be if Harry meets his end in book 
>seven...or six for that matter. ...what kind of awful mess has 
>Pottermania created if Harry were to die?
>
>So pause for a moment and think, what would your reaction be? 
 
Geoff wrote:
>(1) I would throw the book across the room!

Really?  Did you do that when others died?  

See, if JKR wants to kill Harry I expect it to be very well done.  In
fact, so well done I will be frozen over the book, not breathing,
barely blinking processing it all.  

For me, Harry is well primed to die right now.  He has been isolated
well from the other students and brought into the melancholy
"save-the-world" hero mode.  Well illustrated when he ignored the
end-of-year feast.  Harry is not normal anymore.  He is marked by
ethereal ways (ok, it's a glass globe with a prophecy), which really
will screw, with his mind.  He's now not a 15 year old boy with an
annoying dark lord wanting to kill him.  He is a prophesized, mark boy
who sees how he has been groomed to destroy this evil personally.  He
is waking up to a world built to make him able to win this battle.  

Of course, this may not be true and the prophecy might have meant
someone else, but in Harry reality, Dumbledore very clearly has made
his world the way he perceives it.  If it turns out Harry is not the
correct boy, he still has to deal with the reality of all this.

So, killing Harry seems gracious to me almost.  To me, he will never
be normal.  


Geoff:
> (2) This raises an interesting point. If the story is seen from 
> Harry's POV, does the book come to a full stop at that point? I 
> suppose we would go into epilogue mode or something similar.

Nah.  In PS/SS, it started out of Harry's perspective and went out of
Harry's perspective again in the start of GoF.  So I guess, I agree
that the bulk of the story will be in Harry's perspective, but in the
case of his death, it will switch to generic narrator and end in epilogue.


Geoff:
> It was bad enough when Frodo felt he couldn't continue in Middle 
> earth and took ship to Valinor......

And that is how I see Harry.  It is so hard for me to sit on my hands
with Matrix: Revolutions comparisons, but I true want Harry to be the
same kind of hero.  Kind of daft.  In his own world or reality.  But
the right one that can save everything if he only trust himself, his
advisors (even Snape), and his intuition.


Melody