Red Herrings

[Wanda Sherratt]

No: HPFGUIDX 101772

JKR is an expert at inventing red herrings, I think everyone will 
agree.  Her technique is to crowd the canvas with a huge number of 
details, so that we can't possibly tell which ones are important and 
which are just there to distract from the others.  With two books to 
go, we can't right now tell which is which, but I'd be interested in 
knowing what other readers have, in their own minds, identified to 
their own satisfaction as red herrings.  Of course, we're all going 
to have different ideas; somebody's red herring is bound to be 
someone else's absolutely essential clue.  I'll start off with just 
one:

Snape - I think that Snape is one vast red herring.  Ron is 
perpetually voicing dark suspicions of him, and he is always on the 
scene to draw our eyes and make us overlook everything else.  (And 
very effectively, too - he's one of the most entertaining and 
interesting characters in the books.)  His role is never fully 
explained, so we can imagine it as more important than it really 
is.  I think this happened a lot in OotP, from Mrs. Weasley's "He's 
just arrived" at Grimmauld Place to Sirius's grumbling about Snape 
being important and making reports and Harry's daring accusation of 
spying.  I don't believe Snape is the important "He" that Molly was 
referring to, or the key player Sirius implies, but Snape is so 
compelling, he crowds out the other characters so that we miss 
what's REALLY going on.

Wanda