YES ( was: Did Snape "murder" Dumbledore?)

[Matt]

No: HPFGUIDX 138142

--- Eggplant wrote:
> 
> If you were a novelist ... what more could you have done than 
> what JKR did in HBP to convince readers that [a] character has 
> ... been murdered?

Actually, I think there's quite a bit the author could do if she
wished to write the scene as clear rather than ambiguous:

* She could present a lucid and unconflicted motive for the murder and
let the readers hear it confirmed from the perpetrator's mouth.

* She could show the perpetrator behaving with the character of a
murderer either before or after the killing, instead of an inscrutable
gaze before the killing, and after the killing a relatively peaceful
retreat, interrupted by a remarkably restrained exchange with a
supposedly hated adversary.

* She could choose not to start out her writing career with five books
involving the same protagonist who observes the murder, where in every
book he turns out to be deceived or mistaken about one or more
fundamental aspects of what is going on.

* She could choose as the perpetrator a character who has not been
portrayed with tremendous ambiguity in the eyes of everyone other than
that protagonist.  

* She could choose as the perpetrator a character other than one whose
motives and even actions the protagonist has been dead wrong about
numerous times in the past.

That said, the fact that the scene *looks* like Snape murdering
Dumbledore hardly detracts from the view of people who think Snape was
*pretending* to murder Dumbledore.  All it means is that, if Snape was
acting, he did a good job.