What Came First: Task or Cabinet? - A tale of two Dracos

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 157696

BetsyHP wrote:
> <snip>And I've noticed that most folks arguing the "cabinet first"
theory really, really want Draco to stay the sort of selfish and flat
> character he's been through so many books. At least, that's how
> their statements come across to me. And that undercuts one of the
> more powerful stories told in HBP. Which is why I'm making such a
> massive hue and cry for canon. If you're going to piss all over
> what I consider some of the more poignant scenes in HBP, at least
> have the decency to present some solid facts. Or at least, that's
> my thinking on the matter. <g> <snip>
>
Carol responds:
Ages ago I posted the possibility that Draco may have gone to LV
rather than Voldemort going to him and we got into much the same
discussion. If need be, I can hunt up the post and the thread, but
it's interesting that people think this idea is exclusively Steve's.

At any rate, I don't know why you think that people who don't consider
LV's revenge on Lucius as *necessarily* precipitating the whole Draco
plot are denying the change in Draco's character. I'm not saying this
very clearly (cold medication doesn't make for clear thinking), but I
don't for a moment deny that HBP is a coming-of-age story for Draco
that in some ways parallels Harry's, including the falling out with
his formerly trusted mentor.

Absolutely all I'm saying is that Draco, desiring revenge for his
father's arrest, *could* have gone to LV to tell him about the
Vanishing Cabinet connection expecting recognition for his creative
idea (which, ironically, he received from Dumbledore on the tower),
but not expecting LV to use that idea in a more diabolical
way--assigning Draco to fix the cabinet and let the DEs into Hogwarts
as back-up so that Draco can kill Dumbledore. I'm quite sure that part
came as a surprise to Draco, and he would have seen it as a chance fo
"glory" rather than an attempt to punish his father's mistakes.
(Narcissa, knowing only of the impossible assignment to kill DD and
not about the cabinet, saw it differently.) When repairing the cabinet
isn't as easy to fix as Draco supposed, he starts feeling the
pressure to kill Dumbledore by any means available (hence the foolish
and doomed-to-fail necklace and mead attempts). I don't think that
he's started to receive death threats at that point, however. There's
a huge change, a decrease in arrogance and an increase in desperation,
between the "Unbreakable Vow" and "Sectumsempra" chapters.

To backtrack to "Draco's Detour," it's clear that Draco wanted to keep
his plans secret from his mother, so he couldn't just sneak off to
Knockturn Alley any old time between the end of fifth year and the
beginning of sixth. He seems to have waited until he was in Diagon
Alley anyway for his robes and books, etc., then sneaked away from her
to see Borgin. (His mother knew that he'd been ordered to kill DD but
didn't know the Vanishing Cabinet plan, which which *may* have come
before the assignment to kill DD--we don't know whether it did or not.
she, however, had Snape under the Unbreakable Vow, so as far as she
was concerned, everything was under control. We see her back to her
normal pureblood snob, pro-LV self in Madam Malkin's--very different
from the hysterical Narcissa in "Spinner's End.") At that point, Draco
orders Borgin to give him instructions for fixing the cabinet and
threatens to send Fenrir Greyback if Borgin doesn't cooperate. It's
pretty clear that Draco must have told LV the plan and that at least
some Death Eaters, including Greyback, are in on it. It's only Snape
and Narcissa who are out of the loop. (Since Draco is learning
Occlumency from Aunt Bellatrix specifically to thwart Snape, I'm
guessing that she has offered him assistance--maybe to excuse herself
from her involvement in the Unbreakable Vow if LV gets wind of
it?--and is engineering such details as the Imperioing of Rosmerta
even if she doesn't cast the spell personally. She is, after all, a
wanted fugitive. IOW, whether Bellatrix knows about the vanishing
Cabinet plan In "Spinner's End" or not, and I'm guessing that she
doesn't, she seems pretty deeply involved in Draco's plan or plans and
may have been instrumental in the necklace and mead plots. There are
*many* unexplained elements in Draco's plan, a possibly unavoidable
problem with telling the story mostly from Harry's pov and never from
Draco's.)

Whether draco went to LV or LV sent for him in no way alters Draco's
crisis on the tower, when he realizes that killing isn't quite as easy
glorious or as Daddy has always implied. We see him throughout the
book growing consistently paler and losing sleep, looking ill, giving
up Quidditch and failing to hand in his Transfiguration homework. At
first, and we see this on the train and in the interview with Snape,
he thinks he has more important work to do than schoolwork. He tells
his friends that he may not be back next year (he thinks he's a man
now, and being a fully qualified wizard no longer matters--neither, of
course, do NEWTs or classes or even being a Prefect). Even in "The
Unbreakable Vow," he sneers at Snape for teaching *Defense Against"
the Dark Arts, which he claims that "we" have no need for. (Snape
doesn't argue with him, but it's unlikely that he agrees.) Only when
Draco continues to find the cabinet impossible to repair and the other
attempts to kill DD have gone badly awry does he start to become
desperate rather than arrogant and defiant. It seems that he's
receiving death threats at his point. His "plan" (fixing the cabinet)
is failing and, consequently, the "job" (killing DD) isn't getting
done. And he still doesn't confide in Snape, either because LV has
ordered him not to or because Bella has undermined his trust in his
mentor.

So although I think that it's perfectly possible and very much in
character (not to mention being consistent  with Draco's expressed
desire for revenge in OoP and the whole Montague subplot) for Draco to
have gone to LV in the first place (and much more likely from a
logical standpoint than LV coming after *him* and Draco just happening
to have the perfect way of getting DEs into Hogwarts), I don't
disagree with Magpie's general approach to Draco's character arc or
her view of his deteriorating relationship with Snape. Nor do I insist
that I'm right because of some desire to diminish Draco's painful
realization of what being a DE is all about. The order of the events
preceding "Spinner's End" and "Draco's Detour" makes no difference in
that regard at all. We still see the progression, or regression, from
arrogance to defiance to despair to explanations and excuses ("I
didn't invite him!") to lowering his wand almost imperceptibly. I
think that Draco is in limbo like Montague in the Vanishing Cabinet,
not knowing which path to choose, but at least now he has a better
understanding of the choice he'll be making, an understanding he
didn't have when he went to LV with his Vanishing cabinet idea *or* LV
gave him his assignment out of the blue and he just happened to have a
plan that fit perfectly with it. Either way, he's a changed boy (how
appropriate that the tower incident occurs within a few days of his
seventeenth birthday.)

To repeat a point I've made in earlier posts, Snape does *not* confirm
Narcissa's hysterical conclusion that Voldemort assigned the task to
Draco to punish Lucius. All he confirms is that LV is angry with
Lucius. He never says that Voldemort summoned Draco and assigned him
the task of killing Dumbledore as a result of that anger. Probably
Snape doesn't know exactly what happened and wasn't present when Draco
had his conversation with Voldemort. Certainly, he doesn't know about
the cabinet plot, and neither does Narcissa, so of course they don't
talk about it. That doesn't mean it didn't precede the plot to kill
Dumbledore. 

Again, we *don't know* which came first, and a desire to get revenge
on DD by bringing DEs into Hogwarts and to be rewarded for coming up
with the cabinet idea could well have led to LV's desire to punish
Lucius via Draco rather than the other way around. That would be
splendidly ironic and bangy, actually, with Draco learning the hard
way about the consequences of his choices, as well as being faced with
the reality of death and murder (a lesson he might not have learned
had Harry not used Sectumsempra on him so that he might have bled to
death had he not been saved by Snape).

At any rate, I'm not trying to "piss all over" poignant scenes or
deny Draco's character arc, nor is Steve. All we're trying to do is to
establish that we *don't know* which came first, Draco's cabinet idea
or Voldemort's assigning Draco the impossible job of killing
Dumbledore. Nor do we know where Snape fits in (or why he took the UV
or even whether he really knew Draco's assignment to kill DD).
"Spinner's End" raises as many questions as it answers--as does the
whole of Book 6. All we know is that neither Snape nor Narcissa knew
about Draco's idea for the Vanishing Cabinet, over which Draco lost
sleep and on which he worked all year with Polyjuiced!Crabbe and Goyle
as uninformed backup, and over which he "whooped" in triumph when he
finally accomplished the task.

Obviously, some sort of plan was in place to bring the DEs into
Hogwarts when the cabinet was repaired, some sort of communication
with the DEs was involved, but we don't know what it was, especially
with all the precautions in place. And obviously they were under
orders from Voldemort, who obviously knew about the Vanishing Cabinet
plan, to let Draco kill DD once they got him on the tower--at least,
to give him the opportunity before killing him for failing, as
presumably they would have done. And, really, that's all we know. For
all the lengthy conversation on the tower, many questions remain
unanswered. And none of them in any way diminish Draco's dilemma or
his character development.

Carol, who still wants to know, for example, whether Rosmerta was
under orders to point out the Dark Mark to DD and what Blaise was
doing lolling against that column