Ending the series (was Dept. of Mysteries, "Love" room.)

[festuco]

No: HPFGUIDX 130383

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "madorganization" <alishak at s...>
wrote:

> JKR may be able to tell her story without having Harry die.  That 
> would work.  It would also work to have Harry die to show that 
> sacrifice is sometimes necessary for victory.  I do think, however, 
> that even if Harry lives, it won't be the happy ending most children 
> are expecting.  If JKR is to make this story believable and real, 
> then Harry will never be the same again.  We won't ever see that 
> happy, healthy boy we met on the train to Hogwart's.  To bring in a 
> similar story, he'd have to be like Frodo, broken by his 
> experience.  

Gerry

The problem I have with these kind of theories is that people who
support them don't look at the stories themselves. You cannot take the
ending out of the stories and make a general point. 

The ending is good and fitting, because *it fits the story* not
because this is what people supposedly need to hear. Harry is not
Frodo. LoTR is not HP. Frodo starts out as a normal, happy hobbit,
part of the shire who during the books gets more and more isolated
because of his experiences. This trend starts at Weathertop where he
is hit by the Nazgul sword and continues throughout the novels. That
Frodo cannot settle in the Shire is completely logical. You can see it
coming halfway through the story and even before. Sam, Pippin and
Merry, who also have quite a bit of nasty experiences can fit in
though. Not in the same way as before they went, they changed a great
deal. But they are actually better for it. 

Harry starts out completely isolated, and as Laura pointed out, what
he learns in the story is connecting, healing himself. Now if JKR
would go for the Frodo ending, she would need to make Harry disconnect
himself from his friends and the WW pretty quickly to make it
believable. I don't think it likely though. In OoP he was at his most
disconnected, had the terrible experience of Sirus dying, and in what
way the book ends: In him connecting with Luna, both sharing the
experience of having a loved on die. 

To paraphrase Laura: Lord of the Rings is already written, just as
Narnia, Hamlet or the bible and I really do not think JKR needs to
imitate others to make a believable ending to the story. 

Gerry