The 'Seeming' Reality

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 155530

Wynnleaf wrote:
> I don't post often, but read a lot, and thought you all might be 
> interested in this.
> 
> I recently ran across this quote from JKR from the Readers Digest, 
> 2000.  "I love a good whodunnit and my passion is plot construction. 
> Readers loved to be tricked, but not conned," Rowling says, warming 
> to her theme. "The best twist ever in literature is in Jane Austen's 
> Emma. To me she is the target of perfection at which we shoot in 
> vain."
> 
> I love "Emma," and decided to look up something that analyzed how 
> Austen achieved the surprise twists of that book.  Here's a exerpt 
> from an essay written by Jitender Rajpoot, at Cal State and is 
> titled "The 'Seeming' Reality." 
><snip quoted essay>
> While not everyone is fooled by Austen's plot, who was or wasn't 
> fooled doesn't matter - the point is that JKR thought it was the 
> standard of all surprise plots, and that's the kind of thing she 
> says she likes to write. So whether or not Austen fooled everyone 
> isn't the point. The point is that JKR wants to trick people and is 
> likely using the methods of Austen to do it. So the question isn't 
> whether, if you've read it, you were tricked by Austen, but whether 
> we are being tricked by JKR, using similar misdirection methods.  
> And, by the way, it isn't just any character that you shouldn't 
> trust.  If JKR is using Austen's method, it would be Harry's point 
> of view, and by extension the narrator's pov, that you shouldn't 
> trust. 

Carol responds:
As I've noted in other posts, the unreliable narrator is a literary
device used by many authors to misdirect readers. Many first-person
narrators are unreliable, both because their perspective is naturally
limited to what they personally know or witness and because their
biases and preconceptions shape their perceptions of objective
reality. The same limitations apply to the type of narrator we most
frequently see in the HP books, technically called a third-person
limited narrator, meaning that the narrator's "omniscience" is limited
to the pov of a single character or a few select characters and is
both limited and distorted in the same ways as a first person narrator's.

In a very few scenes in the HP books--McGonagall, Dumbledore, and
Hagrid leaving Baby!Harry on the doorstep in SS/PS, part of "The
Riddle House" in GoF and "Spinner's End" in HBP, we see the characters
and action from the outside, not so much an omniscient as an objective
pov in which we have only our own preconceptions and biases to guide
us (at least on a rereading). In a very few other scenes--the first
half of "The Boy Who Lived," in which Vernon Dursley is the pov
character; the second half of "the Riddle House, in which the Muggle
Frank Bryce is the pov character; "The Other Minister," in which the
Muggle Prime Minister is the pov character; and bits and pieces of
various books--the broom-jinxing scene in SS/PS and moments when Harry
is asleep--the pov shifts briefly away from Harry, but in most cases,
what we know is limited to what Harry knows--or thinks he knows--and
his reactions and perceptions color his interpretation of the action
and the other characters, just as Vernon Dursley's and Frank Bryce's
and the Muggle Prime Minister's do. In fact, it may be useful to look
at these chapters, which present the WW from a Muggle perspective, to
see just how unreliable the narrator can be. To take just one example,
the narrator comments that there's no such word as "Quidditch" because
that's the "truth" according to Frank Bryce.

The same technique is frequently used with Harry (the so-called Harry
filter), the most obvious and familiar example being his belief that
his parents were killed in a car accident. And we see him
misinterpreting other characters' actions and motives throughout the
series, and even mistaking what's happening to him when his scar hurts
for possession in OoP. He sees the Thestrals as "terrible" and he
thinks that he must be hallucinating because the only other person who
sees them is Luna. Harry "knows" that Professor Moody drinks from his
own flask for fear of being poisoned; what he doesn't know is that
"Professor Moody" is the polyjuiced Barty Jr., taking advantage of the
real Moody's habit of drinking from a flask to drink polyjuice potion
in plain sight of the entire school. Harry also "knows" that Snape is
going to Crucio him into insanity when in fact Snape is about to save
him from the DE who's actually casting the spell. The phrase "Harry
knew" is highly suspect and should be regarded as a red flag, one of
many devices that JKR uses to mislead the reader.

Other forms of misdirection include having two events happening
simultaneously, so that one seems to cause the other; having Harry's
back turned when something happens or having him distracted so that he
doesn't overhear an entire conversation; not identifying the speaker,
so that even if Harry knows who spoke, the reader doesn't. I could
give examples in every category and list other forms of misdirection,
including standard red herrings relating to the detective/mystery
elements of the plot(s), but I don't want to bore anyone who's read
this far.

Some time back, I started a thread on the Unreliable Narrator (I
finally, found it, Alla!). If you're interested, you can read the
first post here 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/116981

and follow the thread.

All of this is to say that you're exactly right, Wynnleaf. All is not
as it seems in the Potterverse, and we can't trust the narrator except
on those rare occasions when he or she slips out of limited-omniscient
mode into the objective ("dramatic," meaning presented from the
outside, as in a play) pov, in which we see the characters from the
outside with little or no interpretive commentary. And even then,
we're denied access to their thoughts.

Imagine "Spinner's End" from Harry's perspective if that were possible
(which would present Snape as utterly evil), or from Snape's pov
(which were answer all our questions about him and spoil the fun).
Then imagine "The Lightning-Struck Tower" from the objective
("dramatic") pov. In fact, reading the tower scene without the
distorting filter of Harry's perception might just be a good idea. It
won't tell us everything we want to know (what DD and Snape were
thinking and whether they used mutual Legilimency and whether Snape
cast some other nonverbal spell under cover of the AK), but it will at
least enable us to witness the events without Harry's emotions and
preconceptions coloring our perception.

Carol, who really thought she was just going to include a link to the
old thread and can't believe that her fingers typed seven paragraphs
of their own accord