Harry : compassion vs saving-people thing

[annemehr]

No: HPFGUIDX 114868


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "delwynmarch" <delwynmarch at y...>
wrote:
> 
> I've been thinking about that one for a while.
> 
> There seems to be a general agreement that Harry is very
> compassionate. That has always troubled me, because I just don't see
> that. What I see is what Hermione saw : Harry has a saving people thing.
> 
> Let's take a few examples.

<snip the examples><sorry!>

Annemehr:
Well, you know me, we've tried to hash this out before -- and we could
argue back and forth about whether Harry cares about peoples' pain,
whether the narrator is sufficiently identified with Harry's POV to be
taken as an indication of Harry's notice and concern, about how much a
British schoolboy might be expected to go and ask people about their
feelings, or whether he minds his own business, so to speak, until the
stakes are high enough.  I'd point out, among other things, that once
Ginny was safely out of the Chamber, Harry cared about whether or not
she got into trouble.  Then we'd agree to disagree!  ;)

I did think of one example of Harry's compassion, with no question of
life or death involved: when Harry met Neville on the Closed Ward. 
We're familiar with the scene, so I'll just pick out a few phrases:

[Harry] cast around wildly for some means of distracting the others so
that Neville could leave the ward unnoticed and unquestioned...Harry
wanted to stamp on Ron's foot, but that sort of thing is much harder
to bring off unnoticed when you're wearing jeans rather than
robes...Neville looked around at the others, his expression defiant,
as though daring them to laugh, but Harry did not think he'd ever
found anything less funny in his life. (OoP, end of ch. 23)

What about situations where there's no question of Harry doing any
saving, whether or not life and death is involved?  At the Burrow in
GoF, he was startled to find out what Splinching was, and immediatedly
asked whether the people were okay.  Later, after seeing Dumbledore's
pensieve, he spent a sleepless night thinking about what had happened
to the Longbottoms and Barty Crouch Jr. (yes, I noticed that Harry
didn't change his behavior toward Neville after that, and wondered why
-- I might put it down to Harry's reserve, and note that he certainly
did *care,* whether or not he felt there was anything he could do
about it).  After seeing Moody's photo of the old Order, Harry was
horrified that so many of them had died shortly after -- is this
compassion, or just a saving-people-thing frustrated?  If *all* Harry
could care about was just saving those people, and there's no saving
to be done, I wouldn't think he would have felt anything at all, so I
put his feelings down to compassion.

I can believe, compassion *and* a saving-people thing, but I can't
believe Harry has no compassion.

Annemehr