Harry's story , NOT Snape's (was Re: "An old man's mistakes")

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 138960

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, <lady.indigo at g...> wrote:

<snip>

> Frankly, up until now Harry has BEEN a puppet to everyone around 
> him, including Dumbledore, when it comes to the bigger picture as 
> opposed to the villain of the day.

I belong to a school of thought that thinks this line is 
overemphasized.  Rarely is it that the text comes out and says "This 
was actually all set up"; more often, this is an assumption folded in 
by fans (particularly the conspiracy theorists--how is the Safe House 
these days?) to explain things when the surface explanation (things 
just *happened* that way!) seem unsatisfactory.

My own suspicion is that the simpler explanations are more likely to 
be the actual ones.

<snip> 

> It's the questions in his character - how cruelty breeds cruelty 
> (and Snape's cruelty to Harry is fueling our hero's anger in turn), 
> how we judge each other, the potential for redemption (Pettigrew 
> can always deal with this topic, sure, but frankly I don't care 
> about Pettigrew and I've found few other people who do either)

Peter became immensely more interesting to me post-HBP; he's always 
been an open question, a wild card, and I think he's going to play a 
very major role in the denoument.  Prepare for disappointment, then, 
if you don't find him interesting--I think Rowling does.

<snip>

> Rowling's puzzlement over Snape's popularity worries me because it 
> implies that she doesn't really understand the resonance what she 
> herself has written.

Hehe--is it Rowling's blindness to what she's put on the page, or 
have readers cheerfully led themselves astray?  The genius of how 
Snape is written is more in what is implied, what is notably *not* 
there than what is.  If you go and actually think about what we know 
for dead sure about Snape, peeks into his character, it's remarkably 
thin.  My good man Neri posted a list a while back about How To Write 
Snape, which was remarkably accurate.

I don't pretend to know what Rowling is thinking, but I do know this; 
she may well be thinking something very different, as the ultimate 
end/solution/key to the character, than we have been.  You can read a 
number of patterns out of Snape's character, and it's only in 
retrospect that we'll be able to see which is the correct one.

Snape is interesting precisely because the reader is encouraged to 
fill in so many of the blanks.  But, as we saw this past book, 
interesting things happen with fans when the way they filled the 
blanks turned out to be one not in the text, and even contradicted.

If you *want* to read Snape as the thematic key to the story, and 
read *those particular themes*, one solution will be inadequate for 
you.  But that all hinges on those being the themes played out.  For 
example, our ideas about an essentially noble and honorable Snape 
could well be solidly 100% confirmed...or they could be revealed as 
only projections on our part.

Oh, the joys of series fiction!

-Nora rejoices having slaughtered her qualifiers with extreme 
competence