Harry had to fail - Harry's Tragic Flaws

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 130827

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "jenzajlp" 
<jennefer_pizza at m...> wrote:
>> 
> Jen replies:
> I completely agree with this opionion and wanted to expand on it a 
> little.  I think that Harry will also continue to fail through 
HBP, 
> wherein he will eventually learn the lessons he needs to defeat 
> Voldemort in Book 7.  OotP was the first book that really showed 
us 
> all of Harry's flaws, which I think is why so many people
> finished 
> that book disliking him.  I believe that like every tragic hero, 
> these flaws will lead to his downfall (which may not be death).  

Well, that depends on your definition of tragedy, doesn't it?  This 
is the kind of standard Aristotelian definition, which is really to 
say it mirrors the dramatic theories and practices of Sophocles.  
But many other great tragic authors, even the other great Greek 
tragic authors, had very different ideas about what constituted a 
tragedy.  In Aeschylus the tragedy lies in the broken nature of the 
world, in Euripides in the damage wrought on society and individuals 
when unchecked passions burst forth.  In Lyric Tragedy you often had 
a purely good individual caught in disastrous circumstances.

All of which is to say that if JKR wants to play up "tragic" 
elements of her plot, she has many models at hand that don't depend 
on Harry's "flaws" -- most of which, in my own opinion, are not 
flaws at all but simply realistic character traits that happened not 
to be very advantageous in the particular situations chronicled in 
OOTP.

Actually, I rather doubt that JKR intends to turn the saga into a 
pure tragedy, much less a classic tragedy.  She doesn't strike me as 
that kind of author.  Which is not to say there won't continue to be 
tragic elements.  But I doubt we will have a mass killing as 
in "Hamlet" or an attack of Furies as in the "Orestia" -- and I 
seriously doubt that Harry will symbolically castrate himself in 
grief over his sins, as Oedipus does by blinding himself in "Oedipus 
Tyrannus.

Lupinlore