Who killed Dumbledore? Heroes and Not.

[Jen Reese]

No: HPFGUIDX 145117

sherry now:
> I'd take any other outcome.  DDM Snape all along.  Plan of
> Dumbledore's to save Draco and solidify Snape's position with 
> Voldemort.  Even Dumbledore faking his death. Anything, but Harry's
> absolute knowledge that if he hadn't forced the potion down 
> Dumbledore, Dumbledore would be alive.  

Jen: Harry does take on guilt for things that are not his fault. 
Usually he is acting without all the information, information others 
have withheld from him. Dumbledore is evasive about the action of 
the potion and in the middle of the cave sequence, Harry does NOT 
think he is feeding Dumbledore poison:

'No,' said Harry, shaking Dumbledore, 'no you're not dead, you said 
it wasn't poison, wake up, wake up--Rennervate!' (p. 536 Bloomsbury)

JKR set that scene up very carefully. Dumbledore tells Harry the 
potion is not one that will instantly kill him when he drinks it. 
When Harry challenges that idea, Dumbledore switches from talking 
about the potion to Voldemort himself: 'he would not want to 
*immediately* kill the person who reached this island.' 

In my view Dumbledore chose to drink the potion, he chose to order a 
minor who trusts him completely to feed him an unknown potion, not 
telling him what it was (if he even knew). If the potion was a slow-
acting poison and Dumbledore expected his own abilities would make 
it possible for him to drink it and still get to Severus in time for 
an antidote, then that was his choice as well. 

I don't think the juxtaposing of the scene with Harry feeding the 
potion and Snape casting the AK is for plot purposes, to show later 
both 'killed' Dumbledore together or that Snape is covering for 
Harry. Both of these plot ideas ignore the importance of the UV to 
the story, which Snape took willingly with all his faculties in 
place as far as we know. It serves no purpose to show the UV, to 
show the tower with all the players in the UV together in the moment 
when someone is supposed to kill Dumbledore, and then to discover ex 
post facto Harry's potion was the actual cause of death. Rather, I 
think the value of the two scenes is emotional, that both Harry and 
Snape are shown to feel hatred and revulsion for what they are 
doing. We know why Harry feels revulsion for feeding the potion, we 
don't know why Snape appears to feel the same.

Jen