[HPforGrownups] Was Crouch Junior a DE? (was Re: ESE!Fudge)

[Kelsey Dangelo]

No: HPFGUIDX 114198

Carol responded:
[snip]
First, Barty in the Pensieve scene is a nineteen-year-old boy being guarded by Dementors, fiends that he knows can suck his soul away (a premonition?). He's terrified and hysterical. Second, like most DEs, he's probably a former Slytherin, and Slytherins, we're told, will use any means to achieve their ends. Barty's "end," or objective, in this instance is to be free, to avoid Azkaban and the Dementors at any cost. So he combines his very real terror with a lie, a desperate attempt to get his father to believe him. Bellatrix, notice, *wants* credit for her evil deed. If Barty hadn't helped her to do it, I think
she'd have spoken then and there: "Get this coward boy out of here. Rodolphus and Rabastan and I Crucio'd the Longbottoms. He had nothing to do with it." But she says nothing of the kind. In fact, she sets an example of unwavering fanatical loyalty to her master that e later
follows.

[snip]

...Imperioing his own students and Krum, and AKing his father, an act of murder that parallels Tom Riddle's. Yet these curses are not only illegal but immoral "unforgiveable") in themselves because they take away another's life or self-determination. As far as we know, only an evil person like Crouch Jr. or Wormtail or Bellatrix can cast them correctly. (Even Crouch Sr. is corrupted by them, using evil means to attempt the
destruction of evil and so becoming arguably evil himself.) Crouch Jr. also passionately hates Death Eaters who walked free (e.g., Snape and Karkaroff)--by implication because he was a Death Eater who did *not*
walk free.

His being a Death Eater before Azkaban is confirmed by his own account under veritaserum, where he states that he had to be controlled by his father after his recovery from his near-fatal illness: "My father had to use a number of spells to subdue me. When I had recovered my strength, I thought only of finding my master. . . of *returning to
his service*" (GoF Am. ed. 684-85, my emphasis). So is his hatred of Death Eaters who walked free: "We heard the Death Eaters [at the QWC].
The ones who had never been to Azkaban. The ones who had never suffered for my master. They had turned their backs on him. They were not enslaved, as I was. They were free to seek him, but they did not. . . . I was angry. I wanted to attack them for their disloyalty to my master. . . . I wanted to show those Death Eaters what loyalty to my
master meant, and to punish them for their lack of it. I used the stolen wand to cast the Dark Mark into the sky" (686-87).

Pretty conclusive evidence, I'd say, that Barty Jr. was as loyal a Death Eater as Bellatrix Lestrange and had been since before his arrest. Yes, he should have had a trial (minus Dementors) in which he could plead his innocence if he dared to do so in front of Bellatrix, but I suspect that a fair trial would have found him just as guilty as
his older companions. In the face of the Dementors, cowardice overcame fanaticism, but once he's away from the Dementors, fanatical loyalty to Voldemort is his defining trait. If Luna is the antithesis of Hermione, the boy in the Pensieve is the antithesis of Regulus Black.

Kelsey:

I agree with all you said up there, Carol. I would even go further in the argument that BCJ was/is a Death Eater during the Pensieve scene.

Sigh, character motivation. BCJ is a Death Eater because he's rebelling against all that his father obsessively goes against (the Dark Arts). Someone in GOF says that Crouch, Sr. should have spent more time at home than at work, otherwise his son wouldn't have turned. Whether this is accurate is up to debate, but it makes sense. Sort of like the anti-Sirius. In this respect, adolescence would be the precise time that BCJ would want to go to the Dark Side.

Maybe, in the beginning of his turn to DA, he wanted his father's attention. Failing to get it, he instead found Voldemort's attention (meaning that Voldemort became a father-figure for BCJ). This is why, despite years in Azkaban and under a spell, he is still obsessively loyal to Voldemort ("I alone!" sounds like sibling rivalry). 

I like the idea that BCJ was crying and screaming throughout the Pensieve scene because he was doing anything possible to escape and return to Voldemort (someone mentioned that it in fact worked, since his mother arranged his escape).

But I think that his pleas were genuinely emotional (lies, though). Maybe it was a last-ditch effort to get his father's attention (his original motivation for being a DE). Sort of like saying, "I'm your son! For once, choose me over your obsessive hunt against the Dark Arts!" It must have been maddening to think that, even as he sits there on trial with his father sentencing him, he's still not really getting his father's attention. Whether or not Crouch, Sr. choosing to save his son would have redeemed him, we'll never know.

But once daddy sent him to Azkaban, I'm sure BCJ became even more loyal and fixated on Voldemort. Revenge was a motivation.

Kelsey, who remembers acting the brat for paternal attention



		
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