Elkins' Draco Malfoy Is Ever So Lame. (But not sympathetic)

[naamagatus]

No: HPFGUIDX 124595


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "northsouth17" 
<northsouth17 at y...> wrote:
> Ok, my theory: Draco isn't about Draco at all, that's why he's such 
> a 
> shallow, yet sympathetic charecter - he's about Lucius. Draco is 
> going to die in some spectacular, and rather pathetic fashion, and 
> I'm going to feel really sorry for him. And then Lucius will either 
> be unaffected (or he will have been the cause of it) or he will 
>have some change of heart...possibly towards the side of good. 
> 
> I don't think the DE's so far have been portrayed greyly enough, 
and Draco is a dismal failure at showcasing that greyness, so it's 
going to have to be some other character - and yet Draco has been set 
up as sympathetic for some reason, so he is going to involved 
somehow - and so I'm guessing that at a critical moment Lucius will 
>either be redeemed by his love for his son - or betray it. 


Seeing as the DEs are the equivalent of the Nazi SS or Gestapo, I 
don't see how they could be depicted as other than totally black. 
Unlike Slytherin house (to which children are sorted), these are 
adults who deliberately embrace an ideology of hatred, racism and 
cruelty, and who carry out this ideology at every opportunity they 
can. 
As for Lucius, far from needing an opportunity for redemption, he 
functions in the story as the paradigmatic DE. Through encounters 
with him, the reader gets a sense of DE-ism even before we are made 
familiar with the term - cold, cruel, corrupt and corrupting; he is 
THE proponent of the pure-blood ideology. Via this and his immediate 
abuse of Dobby JKR makes the point that ideology is not seperate from 
action.  
Draco's roll is exactly the same, on the level of Hogwarts - he is 
the paradigmatic Slytherin, embodying all of its worst qualities - 
ruthlessness, cold heartness (snakiness?), ambition untempered with 
compassion. And the pure-blood ideology. 
Which is why Draco won't, can't be redeemed. A character who 
personifies evil (of some sort) can't be redeemed without the story 
losing ... structural integrity? balance? something important, 
anyway. You can reasonably redeem a character who teeters, who is 
betwixt and between the poles of Good and Evil - not the poles 
themselves.
(Which is another reason why DD will never be revealed as puppet 
master or otherwise "gray".)

Naama