Prophecy ellipses and Trelawney's revelation

[Janine R. Shahinian]

No: HPFGUIDX 134669

I'm at least 1,000 messages behind, so forgive me if someone already posted
on this.

What do we make of the new information that Snape burst into the room after
Sybil spoke the prophecy to DD? Did DD lie to Harry when he said, "the
eavesdropper was detected only a short way into the prophecy and thrown from
the building" (p. 843 OotP Am hardback)?

Clearly, DD didn't tell the whole truth to Harry. Trelawney told Harry:

"Yes, there was a commotion outside the door and it flew open, and there was
that rather uncouth barman standing with Snape, who was waffling about
having come the wrong way up the stairs, although I'm afraid that I myself
rather thought he had been apprehended eavesdropping on my interview with
Dumbledore -- [snip]" (p. 545 HBP Am. hardback).

So Snape heard the first part of the prophecy, the "barman" confronts him
and apprehends him, and there is a commotion outside the door that lasts
through the remaining telling of the prophecy, preventing Snape from hearing
anything else. Then when Trelawney is finished and snaps out of her trance,
Snape and the "barman" burst into the room and it is only later that Snape
is thrown from the building. But had DD let Harry know that he got a look at
the eavesdropper before he was thrown out, Harry would have asked who it was
and DD wasn't prepared to tell Harry that it was Snape.

How convenient, then, that DD used the pensieve's EasyView mode to replay
Trelawney giving the prophecy. And now we know why there were pauses in the
replay. Had Harry entered the pensieve, I'm sure we would have seen some
kind of white-out tampering like we saw in Slughorn's first memory where DD
needed to block out the sounds of the commotion when they could be heard
inside the room. Instead, DD showed Harry the simpler revolving image of
Trelawney that rose up out of the basin. And while the visual could keep
playing uninterrupted, the soundtrack had to be blanked out at spots, and so
Harry experienced pauses where we saw ellipses.

This is why DD sighed before he prodded the swirling memory with his wand
and why he was lost in thought after it was finished: he knew he was
withholding the information about Snape being the eavesdropper. He obviously
wasn't sighing over being the receiver of the prophecy, as he came right out
and told Harry he heard it:

"Who heard it?" asked Harry, though he thought he knew the answer already.
"I did," said Dumbledore.
(OotP p. 840)

Not: "I did," sighed Dumbledore. He only sighed after he created the
modified memory and started it up for Harry to hear.

- Janine