Circumstantial proof of DDM Snape (long)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 143671

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Irene Mikhlin 
<irene_mikhlin at b...> wrote:

> I'm still not sure where she will go. I can easily see JKR writing 
> about Harry, Ron and Hermione doing it all without any help, 
> through "sheer dumb luck". Whether she can pull it off in a way 
> that won't be completely ridiculous, remains to be seen.

Well, she's openly hinted at more than 'sheer dumb luck':

MA: Here at the end you sort of get the feeling that we know what 
Harry's setting out to do, but can this really be the entire 
throughline of the rest of the story?

JKR: It's not all of it. Obviously it's not all of it, but still, 
that is the way to kill Voldemort. That's not to say it won't be 
extremely an torturous and winding journey, but that's what he's got 
to do. Harry now knows — well he believe he knows – what he's facing. 
Dumbledore's guesses are never very far wide of the mark. I don't 
want to give too much away here, but Dumbledore says, `There are four 
out there, you've got to get rid of four, and then you go for 
Voldemort.' So that's where he is, and that's what he's got to do.

ES: It's a tall order.

JKR: It's a huge order. But Dumbledore has given him some pretty 
valuable clues and Harry, also, in the course of previous six books 
has amassed more knowledge than he realizes. That's all I am going to 
say.

------------

Harry may not always be the absolute fastest at doing what needs to 
be done, but he does have exceptionally valuable intuition, a kind of 
edge that the more methodical Hermione lacks.  He won't be doing 
everything alone, but there's enough interesting possibilities with 
the quest given that I'm not sure she'd want to pull in the deus ex 
machina 'Oh, look, Snape already killed a few of them'.

> (Oh, and would not it devalue Dumbledore as a wise and powerful 
> wizard? To be bested by three half-trained teenagers?)

Guessing about JKR's portrayal of Dumbledore is a tricky thing, these 
days.  Given that Harry is her hero, he came into her mind first, and 
she's built everything around him, I'd say it's an inherent structure 
of the narrative that he surpasses Dumbledore in some field, by the 
end of the story.  He may well see things from a different 
perspective not accessible to the older man, and thus arrive at the 
solution needed.

But I wouldn't even put it in terms of competition like that, as 
Harry is clearly going to be going off of the knowledge Dumbledore 
gave him.  Presumably Dumbledore would have helped even more on this 
quest, knowing how hard it was going to be, had he not taken an 
authorially-designatedly green jet of light in the chest and ended up 
dead. :)

-Nora takes how much an author likes characters as a useful heuristic 
for guessing, but it has its limits