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

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 138995

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

<snip>

> Nonetheless, she has spent 6 books worth of material on Snape and 
> barely a few chapters worth on Peter. We know nothing about him 
> beyond an insecure boy who turned his back on his friends for 
> cowardice's sake and is now living a miserable life on the other 
> side. Of course he can redeem himself, and so much the better for 
> it, but it's not going to have the resonance of anything that 
> could ever happen with Snape if only because it's going to take a 
> *lot* of background material to flesh him out so much it's 
> relevant. And doing all that so last-minute might very well be 
> shoddy storytelling.

'Six books' is a little misleading; Snape has figured into six books, 
but when you go back and look at how much actual page time he has, he 
does far less than one might think (especially given his habitually 
inflated role in fanfiction).  We certainly never get much insight or 
illumination into his actions.

That's not to deny that he's been more central than Peter, but Peter 
has always been there, in the background--perhaps even more pivotal 
in events than Snape has been.  It's been a huge question since book 
3, why did Peter do it?  And being as this connects immediately to 
James and Lily's deaths, I think there's a lot of resonance there.

<snip>

> But that's exactly it. Your complaint here is that it'll turn into 
> Snape's story if there's some key to him, something we have yet to 
> learn, and the focus is put on learning it - but this is a 
> character where there is a LOT left to learn, and what we have 
> learned is rather troubling and actually makes him sympathetic to a 
> reader. 

That wasn't quite my complaint, actually; I just hooked onto the 
thread.  :)

But then again, maybe I'm an odd one and actually found Snape *far* 
more sympathetic before OotP.  Why?  Because then, under the open 
situation we had, not knowing which way the war would go, I had hopes 
for Snape acting like a mature and helpful adult.  I actually lost 
some sympathy for Snape after the Pensieve scene when he throws Harry 
out--it's all about Snape and his humiliation there, and he can't or 
won't calm down enough (later, either) to wonder what Harry 
*actually* thought about the situation.  

I suspect a little more of the other shoe is going to drop, as HBP 
did some of that with Snape's invention of the curses.

<snip>

> How am I putting unnecessary focus on those themes? I never once 
> claimed they're the key, or what the story will end up being 
> "about", but they're all there, and brought up time and time again. 
> Importantly so. You can't have a final battle with Snape and not 
> deal with the ambiguities of his character. 

Those themes are there if you want to read them as consistently 
there.  However, HBP did us all the favor of problematizing 
everything we know about Snape, without resolving solidly any of the 
major issues (schooldays, so-called Prank, role in the DEs, 
defection), which means those things may not be actual.

<snip>

> Maintaining that realism also means you can't make it as simple 
> as "You know that man who seemed bad all the time but the guy who 
> knew everything always trusted him for a secret we never got to 
> know about? ...Well, the secret was really lame, and the guy who 
> knew everything was just an idiot, and the man who seemed really 
> bad? Was really bad. And then we killed him, and that's the end." 
> If this is the choice JKR makes in the end, I don't know how you 
> couldn't call that bad writing. 

[Is that the realism that gives us an emotionally sound Harry after 
10-something years of neglect at the hands of his relatives?  Or 
should we say plausibility...ack, not a great word either.  Welcome 
to the realm of fiction...]

It's all in motivations, methinks.  The guy who knew everything could 
be not an idiot, but cruelly deceived by someone he thought was 
genuine.  It could be exceedingly BANG-y whereby Harry has been wrong 
about Snape in the past, but for once is actually right.  If you 
increasingly think (as I do) that JKR has a concept of Character, the 
red flags have been going off for books.

I also think the complexity of the books well can be overrated.  Note 
all the wacky theories for plot that people have come up with, almost 
none of which have turned out; it's not too much of a stretch to note 
that very complex theme-readings, and not only the plot-readings, 
might turn out to be pushed aside.

Even for my formulation of Out For Himself Snape, he's explainable 
with a surprisingly small amount of information.  As I see it, the 
key to the character is that his complexity has been pinned on a 
combination of observed actions and omitted implications--and I don't 
know what the ultimate balance is.

Harry is a far more complex character, in the long run.

-Nora prepares to finish moving, alas