Knowing it was Snape (was: What has Snape seen)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 119182


Carol earlier:
> > The difference is that we're looking at Snape's memories, not the>
student body of Hogwarts. He has to be present in all of them. Ergo,
the lonely teenager zapping flies has to be Severus, as does the boy
on the bucking broom. Harry is therefore most likely right in also
identifying the small crying boy rather than the hook-nosed man as
snape. He knows very well what the adult Snape looks like and he knows
whose memories he's viewing.
> 
SiriuslySnaapeySusan responded:
> Once again we're at cross purposes.  I don't understand why Snape 
> has to be IN each memory.  I have all kinds of memories of people 
> and places and events, and sometimes the pictures I have in my mind 
> are of those *other* people and places:  my grandfather smoking a 
> pipe; my mom & dad playing tennis; my brother graduating from med 
> school.  I'm in the audience, as it were, and I don't believe that 
> if someone accessed my memories they'd see ME; rather, they'd see 
> those other individuals *as I saw them*, but I'd be nowhere in sight.

Carol responds:
True, in real life we see memories from our own perspective. But the
memories conjured by the Legilimency spell, like those in the
Pensieve, appear to be objectified representations. That is, they're
not from the perspective of the person remembering them but from that
of a third-person observer. So both Snape and Harry see nine-year-old
Harry up in a tree, and both see four- or five-year-old Severus crying
as his fther bullies his mother. The only difference between the
Pensieve memories and those conjured by the Legilimency spell appears
to be that one is fleeting and visual only; the other is substantial,
involves at least three senses, and can be entered. But neither is a
memory as you and I normally experience them. These are memories that
a Legilimens like Voldemort or Dumbledore could see, and in which he
would recognize at least one person--Snape or Harry. Even the memory
of young Tom Riddle preserved in the diary operates on the same
principle. The person whose memory it is is present in all the
memories and visible to the outsider who views them, regardless of
whether the means of viewing is the diary, some form of Legilimency,
or the Pensieve.

If this reasoning is valid, then a younger Snape is present in the
three memories that Harry sees. Clearly the teenage boy stunning flies
and the boy on the broom must be Snape, and quite probably the crying
child is, too, simply because Harry would recognize the adult Snape,
and surely he would wonder about Snape's wife and child if he thought
Snape had had them. But no such question enters his mind.

I think, too, that any such ultrapersonal memories, if they existed
and related to Snape's opposition to Voldemort, would have been placed
for safekeeping in the Pensieve.

Once again, though there are occasions when we can and should distrust
the narrator, I see no reason to distrust the identification of the
fighting couple as little Severus's parents. It certainly makes more
sense, IMO, as a partial explanation of his present character than a
mysterious wife and child. The man abuses the woman in front of the
child. If Snape would do that, would he also mourn the loss of those
people, as we must assume that he does if we accept the Snape as
husband scenario? It makes no sense to me. And if Harry can recognize
an adolescent Snape, he can certainly recognize the adult Snape,
whether he's twenty-two or thirty.

Carol