Ginny's Role in Book 7 (was: Re: Four ponderings)

[hickengruendler]

No: HPFGUIDX 145021

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "h2so3f" <h2so3f at y...> wrote:
>  As 
> others have observed, the story is told from Harry's POV so this 
> makes perfect sense. It isn't so much that Ginny had changed as 
> Harry finally noticing her.
 
Hickengruendler:

Yes, that was said quite often, but I'm not sure that it is true. 
There are bits from the books, that are not told from Harry's point 
of view. And I don't even mean the obvious bits like the beginning of 
HBP. Take for example the last sentence of the chapter "The 
Unforgivable Curses" from GoF. Here the narrator mentions something 
(Neville lying awake, thinking about Moody's lesson) while 
emphasizing, that it is something Harry does not realize. What the 
author is doing here, is showing the readers a connection between 
Harry and Neville (both lying awake and thinking about what happened 
to their parents), that Harry is at that time not aware of. It even 
is done that well, that many readers didn't realize or forgot, that 
we are leaving Harry's point of view for a very short time. Therefore 
something like this could have done with Ginny's character as well, 
but it wasn't. 

IMO, and that's of course only a guess, JKR waited until OotP with 
her big reveal about Ginny's character, because it fitted one theme 
of the book, which was seeing many characters from a different side. 
I just think, that it was done better with most other characters, 
than it was with Ginny. I can't really point to the exact reason, why 
I think so, but I know that Ginny's development did not rang true for 
me and still doesn't. One reason might be, that some explanations for 
her behaviour are simply impossible (secret Quidditch training), 
another one that JKR overdid it to make Ginny seem like the best 
thing ever for Harry (though that's rather a problem of HBP, IMO) or 
that most of Ginny's development was indeed only told in 
retrospective. 

Hickengruendler