What if Harry dies?

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 85315

I think I was getting tired when I wrote message 85267 last night, 
because on re-reading it this morning, I realised that I had missed 
out on what I intended to be the centre of the message. It was my 
intention to comment on the end of "The Last Battle", to which Mirror 
of Erised made reference. In that book, the three children who have 
retained their links to Narnia come back and are with Aslan when he 
brings that world to an end. They go through the stable door, meet 
their parents and realise that they have all been killed in a train 
crash and this is the afterlife. 

Two points. First, as I said, Narnia is very much a children's 
allegory for the Christian faith. At the end of "The Voyage of the 
Dawn Treader", Aslan appears as a lamb which is the great Christian 
symbol of the risen Christ in the book of Revelation. Here at the 
very end of the story, we are told that he no longer looks like a 
lion and for the children "it was only the beginning of the real 
story." My second point, which is more germane to Harry, is that, 
in "The Last Battle",  the characters' POV goes over with them into 
the new heaven. As I said a day or so ago, if Harry dies, then there 
has to be an awkward shift in the POV at this point. If it were to 
happen then whether we switch to an authorial/narrative view would 
have to be seen. I realise that there are books where the leading 
character dies and the point of view is carried up to that point ("A 
Tale of Two Cities" comes to mind) but the narrative stops there. For 
Harry to die and the book come to a full stop seems to be unlikely; 
it would be too abrupt and would lack a full closure.

Geoff