CHAPTER DISCUSSION: Chapter 30 (Grawp)

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 117406


Elfun Debbie summarized Chapter 30 in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/117118 :

<< nags Harry about asking Snape to resume Occlumency lessons, saying
Ron told her he was muttering in his sleep. Harry lies, claiming he
was exhorting Ron to reach for the Quaffle; Ron is hurt by the remark
but Harry felt vindictive pleasure. >>

This is relevant to the thread about Harry being innately good or
choosing to be good. If he was CHOOSING to 'be good' by following the
Golden Rule, he would have either thought first before being nasty, or
apologized afterwards when he saw Ron hurt. A slight moment's
vindictiveness doesn't make Harry BAD, but it IS related to TMR's
motivating emotion of hate, rage, and cruelty (like the tunicate is
related to whales and chimpanzees!). I suppose that any reader who had
never felt any little tinge of that emotion wouldn't understand how
LV's current behavior might be related (!) to his childhood... 

Like all Harry's other anger and nastiness in OoP, how much is a
natural human response under the circumstances (maybe all of it) and
how much is leakage from Voldie through the mind-link? 

Juli replied in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/116925 to my
previous post on that subject:

<< I don't think every time he was mad or angry at them it was because
LV was mad/angry. Harry behaved like this cause he had a lot on his
mind, (snip) . ... I can understand his mood, he's mad at everything
and everyone, >>

Even tho' LV wasn't mad/angry at any particular person or thing at
those moments, LV is *always* mad/angry, so it would always be
'leaking' to Harry, and adding to all those other reasons for anger
that I snipped.

Back to the chapter summary, whose questions have all been very well
answered already, but I want to mouth off on: 

<< 5. Hagrid calls Grawp "harmless" even though Grawp caused Hagrid's
injuries. He needs to be tied down. Harry doubts he could ever be
permitted to mingle with humans. Is this a signal to reassess
Hermione's conclusion in GoF that wizarding attitudes toward giants is
"just prejudice"? Do Grawp's circumstances cause or contribute to his
wildness? >>

The whole description of how giants live, killing each other to become
ruler, and beating each other up to take the other's food or whatever,
suggests a flaw in Hermione's "it's just prejudice" attitude. If we
view them as Beasts, they're going extinct because of habitat loss,
not enough room for them to spread out and avoid conflict by avoiding
each other, and that's sad: the Earth's wealth of species (except
germs! and parasitic worms!) should be preserved in Nature Preserves.

But if we view them as Beings, that is, moral agents, I think they are
not very Good. Once we discussed this before, and someone told me not
to be so prejudiced against the giants' culture for being different
than mine. 

In that case, Hagrid trying to 'civilize' Grawp by indoctrinating him
into human wizarding culture would be analoguous to the 19th century
efforts to 'civilize' Native Americans or Australian Aborigines by
taking them from their parents and sending them to boarding schools
where they were beaten for speaking their native languages, and surely
 JKR is the kind of person who would NOT approve of that.

By the way, the description of how unhuman full-blood giants look, as
well as their behaviour, made me wonder a lot what Hagrid's father saw
in Hagrid's mother.