[HPforGrownups] Re: What Came First: Task or Cabinet? - The Plan v1 & v2

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 157667

> Carol again:
> We're talking in circles here. We don't really get an explanation in
> "Spinner's End." In fact, that whole chapter is a mystery. The only
> thing we do know, after having read the book, is that Snape didn't
> know about the Vanishing Cabinets. So, obviously, he couldn't have
> discussed them.

Magpie:
Okay, here's how I see the mystery of this plotline working in HBP.  "The 
Plot to kill DD" plot begins at Spinner's End.  By "begins" I don't mean 
chronologically, since obviously elements of the story have already 
happened.  But the narrator begins the story in the book with Spinner's End.

The chapter is chock full of exposition.  If we've read the other books 
we've met these people before, but even then we don't know them in this 
context.  So we're getting Snape the double or maybe triple agent, a lot 
about life on their side, some things that have happened recently that are 
important. Even someone reading the book for the first time can see that 
these are not straightforward people, and the chapter raises more questions 
than it answers.

But what's driving the action is this woman, Narcissa, who appears already 
on the run to see Snape, desperate.  At first she says her son has been 
given a dangerous assignment he can't do.  Everyone agrees on this fact. 
It's an assigment that's described as being an honor and a chance for glory, 
and one that her son is eager to prove himself by succeding at it.  Narcissa 
seems to originally want Snape to convince LV to give the assignment to 
someone else, which Snape says is impossible.  Narcissa then comes to 
believe it's as bad as she feared--her son is being set up to fail to punish 
her husband.  Lucius' screw ups--during a raid that also put Bellatrix into 
his bad graces--are also discussed, as is the Dark Lord's anger regarding 
them.

Could there be more to the story and could these people be mistaken or 
lying?  Sure.  The story calls into question some of the things learned in 
this chapter later (what side is Snape on?).  But it doesn't call everything 
into question. Presumably some stuff in the chapter is true, some is false.

The narrator's given us a dramatic situation as the start of a 
story-desperate woman, son given suicide mission, mysterious man with 
questionable alliances and motives takes vow to do it for him.  It's a 
bang-up set-up to a story.  It's hard for me to imagine that if this were a 
standalone book anyone would read that scene and respond with, "Okay, but 
what's really going on?  This Dark Lord guy couldn't really care about 
punishing these people."  The "Revenge on the Malfoys" plot appears to me to 
be part of the groundwork, not something to wonder about, but something that 
launches us into the story and then it's just--giddyup, let's find out how 
this plays out!  And the climax comes right back to everything in this 
scene, up in the Tower.

Then we've got Harry, our pov character, and he's wondering what's going on. 
He suspects that Draco is working for the Dark Lord.  Now the Spinner's End 
chapter doesn't just provide mysteries about what will happen and what is 
happening, it begins to provide suspense as well--particularly the part 
about Voldemort being angry at Lucius and this being a suicide mission.  The 
main reason Harry's theories about Draco keep getting dismissed by 
reasonable people like Hermione and Arthur and Ron is that it's Malfoy, and 
he's 16--why would Voldemort ever give him a task?  And the suspense comes 
because we, the reader, are privvy to information that these people aren't. 
We have been given an answer to that question.  We know that he does have a 
reason to give this kid an assignment.  And we know something else they 
don't know, which is that the plan is for Draco to wind up dead, so the 
logic that he can't use Draco because Draco will fail is exactly wrong. 
It's an ingenious way to use a character who one would have thought would be 
completely useless as the villain in a mystery.

What's Hitchcock's line about the difference between surprise and suspense? 
Four guys playing poker and a bomb blows up the table is surprise.   Show 
the audience the bomb and it becomes suspense.  This story has elements of 
both--in some ways we're in Harry's place not knowing what Draco's doing, so 
the DEs showing up is a surprise, for instance.  But we also know more than 
many characters.  We know that Harry is right, that Draco has an important 
mission from Voldemort (for many readers it's already clear from Spinner's 
End that the task is to kill DD), and we know something else Harry doesn't, 
that Draco is in danger as well.

So as somebody reading the story, I see the surprise, the mystery and the 
suspense as all being an important part of the story. Characters in the dark 
about Draco's mission can't question whether Voldemort really cares about 
the Malfoys enough to make Draco's death a priority because they're either 
just taking it as a given that Malfoy's working for him (Harry) or rejecting 
the idea that he could be working for Voldemort, period (Hermione, Ron, 
Arthur, etc.).  Characters who do know about the revenge plot aren't 
questioning the motives either that we see, just operating with that as 
their priority, trying to protect Draco.  So since nothing in canon raises 
this as something that needs to be questioned twice, it wasn't a question 
the text seemed to be encouraging me to ask.

Alla:

I would be much much more confident  that this was indeed ** the
only answer** given in the books if I could make Snape and Narcissa
testify under oath, you know? :)

Magpie:
Heh--well that basic difference has come up before.  It's a good policy with 
real people.  But when you're writing a story, it's all an illusion to begin 
with.

Alla:
Right now, I see a potential for backstory Steve came up with to
lurk in the shadows of that answer, which is IMO does look shaky
enough.

Magpie:
If by potential you mean that there's nothing stopping the author from 
writing that in the next book I absolutely agree to that.  I don't feel 
confident at all about anything in book VII.  If Book VII never references 
the Cabinet plot again except as just something everyone knows happened 
then I will be adamant about it, but not before.  I'm chicken that way.:-)

Snow:
"I've just said, haven't I? Maybe he doesn't care if I'm qualified.
Maybe the job he wants me to do isn't something that you need to be
qualified for," said Malfoy quietly.

At this point Malfoy is under the impression that he need not be
qualified for what he is being asked to do. Now does this sound like
someone being ordered to kill the most powerful wizard of all time
himself?

Magpie:
Yes, it does sound like a young wizard being ordered to kill the most 
powerful wizard of all time--and it's important that that (killing DD) is 
his task because Snape has vowed to do it for him if it seems he will fail. 
The whole story will lead up to Draco failing (necklace, wine, stand-off in 
the Tower) and Snape doing it.  Draco is completely right in saying that he 
doesn't need to be qualified to kill Dumbledore.  Nobody needs to have a 
degree to commit murder.  Draco doesn't think Dumbledore's the greatest 
wizard of all time--he's an old man--possibly a "stupid old man" who's the 
headmaster of his school.

In fact, this is yet another scene I should have mentioned as a big place 
where "Draco went to Voldemort" should go, along with the other scenes. He's 
boasting cryptically in totally the wrong way.

Snow:
At this point all we can be certain
of is that Malfoy is looking into fixing the cabinets and has the Dark Mark 
on his arm, unless someone is under the assumption that it would not take 
any qualified skill to kill the Headmaster; Even Draco
wouldn't be that cocky to assume he could do the nasty to Dumbledore without 
skill.


Magpie:
We know Draco is looking into fixing the Cabinets.  We don't know that he 
has the Dark Mark on his arm.  He is indeed under the assumption that it 
would not take full qualifications to kill the headmaster, and is cocky 
about it. Draco isn't saying he can kill Dumbledore without *skill.*  He's 
saying it's something he doesn't need to be "fully qualified" for, and he's 
right.

Snow:

Sounds like a fairly accurate assumption to me especially since we see that 
Draco's cocky attitude gives way to crying to Myrtle over halfway through 
the book, what changed?

Magpie:
He discovered he wasn't cut out for killing, for one.

Snow:
Even Dumbledore himself notices upon reflection to Draco that his feeble 
attempts at killing him seemed almost like his heart wasn't in it. That 
would be because at the point that he attempted to kill Dumbledore via the 
necklace and mead, Draco was more interested in the cabinets.why would that 
be unless he was yet to be informed of his actual mission?

Magpie:
Good lord, the entire plot is unraveling before my eyes!  Draco is 
confronting his not being a killer and the reality behind his fantasy of 
being a DE.  His attempts to kill are not half-hearted because he's more 
interested in fixing furniture, but because he doesn't have the heart of a 
murderer. This is a transformative story, Draco's not just passively 
reacting to off-page plot complications.

Snow:
The problem is Draco's secrecy about his cabinet venture, even from his 
mother, caused him greater problems. Draco was not expecting such a mediocre 
backup group of deatheaters as he well aknowledged to Dumbledore when the 
fact that Fenrir was inside the school of Draco's friends.

Magpie:
Mediocre?  No, the issue isn't that they're mediocre.  They burst in at the 
moment when Draco was lowering his wand, accepting that he did not want to 
kill.  And once they show up and he can't do that, they're there waiting for 
him to kill and he knows now he isn't going to for sure. The back up is now 
preventing the back out.  The arrival of Fenrir just piles on more 
horror--he's not mediocre, he's terrifying.  When DD says he's surprised 
Draco would bring him to the place where his friends are, Draco, for the 
first time in all of canon, actually wants DD to think him a better person 
than someone who would do that.  It's not the story of a school-age Death 
Eater reacting to practical difficulties between and his goal to kill DD and 
attack the school.

Betsy Hp:
Any canon to back that conclusion up?  Raise it above the level of 
speculation?  Because this is *really* important to your theory.  The timing 
of Draco hearing Montague's story is crucial and it's a
really tiny window you're trying to squeeze it into.

Magpie:
I'm going to go further and say that imo the whole timeline here is not very 
important at all.  "Oh dear, maths!" September 1 is always the same day of 
the week in this series--I don't think JKR is using a calender to plot out 
this story.  Reading HBP I thought the only thing that mattered was that 
Draco knew about the Cabinet before Draco's Detour, Chapter Six, which seems 
to be his first step in that plan.  The other important thing is that we saw 
the Montague stuff in OotP.  Draco's anger at Harry in OotP is the threat in 
the hallway and the attempted ambush on the train, and I think it's wrapped 
up in HBP when he breaks Harry's nose "for his father."  Symbolically, 
actually, Draco finally jumps off that emotional hamster wheel there.

-m