[HPforGrownups] Snape's Memories Again

[Lisa Williams]

No: HPFGUIDX 135638

Kat Macfarlane writes:  "Why is it that when we are shown Snape's
memories (OotP, hb U.S. ed.), both when he is teaching Harry
Occlumency (p. 592) and in the Pensieve (pp. 640-649), Snape appears
"in the third person", as it were?
That is, from the outside, even though it is Snape doing the
remembering?  Am I just strange? Don't most people remember themselves
"in the first person", from the inside out?"

Lisa responds:  It doesn't appear that this has been answered yet, but
I apologize if I have and it just isn't on this digest.  ;0)  In JKR's
Mugglenet/Leaky Cauldron interview of 7/16/05, she answered a question
about the pensieve:  she said that the memory in the pensieve is the
scene as it factually occurred, unblemished by the person's bias.  So
(my translation here), while we remember something in a certain way,
from our own perspective within the memory, when we actually put that
memory in a pensieve, it shows the unbiased memory that anyone would
have about that particular scene, therefore from a third-person point
of view.  Here's JKR's exact wording:

MA: One of our Leaky ""Ask Jo"" poll winners is theotherhermit, she's
50 and lives in a small town in the eastern US. I think this was
addressed in the sixth book, but, ""Do the memories stored in a
Pensieve reflect reality or the views of the person they belong to?""
JKR: It''s reality. It''s important that I have got that across,
because Slughorn gave Dumbledore this pathetic cut-and-paste memory.
He didn't want to give the real thing, and he very obviously patched
it up and cobbled it together. So, what you remember is accurate in
the Pensieve.
ES: I was dead wrong about that.
JKR: Really? 
ES: I thought for sure that it was your interpretation of it. It
didn''t make sense to me to be able to examine your own thoughts from
a third-person perspective. It almost feels like you'd be cheating
because you'd always be able to look at things from someone else's
point of view.
MA: So there are things in there that you haven't noticed personally,
but you can go and see yourself?
JKR: Yes, and that's the magic of the Pensieve, that's what brings it alive. 
ES: I want one of those!
JKR: Yeah. Otherwise it really would just be like a diary, wouldn''t
it? Confined to what you remember. But the Pensieve recreates a moment
for you, so you could go into your own memory and relive things that
you didn't notice the time. It''s somewhere in your head, which I'm
sure it is, in all of our brains. I'm sure if you could access it,
things that you don't know you remember are all in there somewhere.

Lisa/SassyMomOfThree