"revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face"

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 135585

grindieloe wrote:
> I think that Harry calls Snape a coward for the simple reason that 
> Snape would never think to take on Dumbledore if DD had a wand and 
> could defend himself properly.  That makes him a coward in this 
> instance.  

Carol responds:
I agree that this is Harry's reason for calling him a coward, but I
don't agree that Harry is correct.

I also agree that Snape was not expecting a wandless, defenseless, and
dying Dumbledore. But that doesn't mean that Snape found it easy to
kill him or was happy to do so. Perhaps he is desperatley hoping, even
as he "hurtles" to the tower to save Draco, that Dumbledore, the most
powerful wizard in the WW despite LV's view to the contrary, will save
himself, dealing with the Death Eaters as he dealt with Fudge and his
cronies in OoP, and able to escape using Fawkes. Had he done so, Snape
would not have had to kill him. And perhaps that accounts in part for
Snape's anger, which Harry reads as hatred, and his revulsion, which
(as we've already estableished) may relate to Dumbledore's silent
request rather than to Dumbledore himself.

At any rate, the hatred and revulsion do not appear in Snape's face
until *after* his wordless exchange with Dumbledore. Moreover, if
Snape had not fulfilled his Unbreakable Vow and killed Dumbledore when
Draco failed to do it, he would have died and the Death Eaters would
have committed the murder themselves. Imagine Fenrir Grayback ravaging
and desecrating Dumbledore's dead body. Such a vision in Snape's mind,
if indeed he was loyal to Dumbledore, would certainly account for a
look of hatred and revulsion.

I hope we are all agreed that Dumbledore, who definitely is not a
coward, is not pleading for his life. In any case, it seems clear that
he is already dying at this point, and though he retains his wisdom,
he has lost most of his powers. Surely the message exchanged between
them was not "Severus, please! Don't kill me!" (And what would be the
point? He was going to die, anyway.)

I think it was something like: "Severus, please! You cannot save me.
You *must* keep your word."

And Snape, horrified and revolted by his own deed but more so by what
will happen if he breaks his vow and fails both Draco and Dumbledore,
does what he has promised Dumbledore he will do if he has no
alternative. And he also has a duty to save and protect Draco. That,
too, is part of the vow.

As we learn in the Pensieve scene of Karkaroff's hearing in GoF, Snape
has faced danger from the time he first became Dumbledore's spy before
he began teaching at Hogwarts and before the Potters died. We again
see him placing himself in danger at the end of GoF, when Dumbledore
says "You know what I must ask you to do," that is, to return to
Voldemort and persuade him that he has not left him forever. If he
were really a coward, or motivated by the simple self-preservation
that Portrait!Phineas tells us is the Slytherin philosophy, he would
not have risked death to fulfill this requet. And he would simply have
sneered at Harry and told him that courage was nothing but
recklessness of the kind that led to Sirius Black's death. But Snape
values courage and the charge of cowardice in such circumstances pains
him almost to the point of insanity. IMO, he is tortured because the
charge is false and he can't defend himself to Harry, who hates him
and is still foolishly ignoring Snape's lessons.

Remember Dumbledore's words to Harry when Harry tells him the
conversation that he's overheard between Snape and Draco, which even
Harry suspects that Snape must already have told DD or he would not
dismiss it as unimportant: "I understood everything you told me. I
think you might even consider the possibility that I understood more
than you did" (HBP 359 Am. ed.). I think that we as readers should
consider this possibility as well.

On a sidenote: I'm not sure that the nickname "Snivellus" is directly
related to cowardice. Snape dislikes it and retaliates with sarcasm
when Sirius Black uses it in OoP, but he doesn't go ballistic. (We now
know that it wasn't being turned upside down and humiliated so much as
having his own spell used against him that makes the Pensieve scene
his worst memory, and that James never attacked him one on one; it was
always in the company of his friends, four on one even if Remus and
Wormtail did not directly participate.)

Perhaps "Snivellus" means not "coward" but "crybaby" and relates to a
moment before the Pensieve scene at the end of their fifth year when
MWPP found Severus in tears. I'm guessing that this would have been
when he was still a child, but it could have been later--and would
have resulted in more sneering from James and sirius if he'd been
fifteen rather than eleven or twelve. And I'm guessing that the cause
was the death of his mother, the one person who had loved him. That
would give him ample reason to hate MWPP, and perhaps it accounts for
the increasing darkness of his annotations to his potions book and for
the invention of Sectumsempra, "for enemies." Could it have been his
hatred for James that pushed him into joining the Death Eaters? If so,
once he repented joining, it would have been very difficult, if not
impossible, to forgive James. But this paragraph, I admit, is
speculation, and is not central to my argument in this post.

My point is that we should not simply accept Harry's view regarding
Snape--that he is a traitor and a murderer without justification or
extenuating circumstances. Snape faced the terrible choice of killing
Dumbledore and being viewed as a traitor and murderer by the entire WW
or breaking his vow and dying, escaping the duty to kill Dumbledore
himself but leaving him to a worse death at the hands of the Death
Eaters (and breaking his promise to help and protect Draco as well).
And he chose infamy rather than death. That, surely, was not the
choice of a coward.

Even if you don't accept my arguments, and certainly some are stronger
than others, I ask anyone who sees Snape in Harry's black-and-white
terms to reread HBP looking for signs of misdirection on JKR's part