The Too Unreliable Narrator (was: What really happened on the tower)

[Neri]

No: HPFGUIDX 155792

 
> Pippin:
> But whether the character must know is blurred in this case. We
> think, on first reading, that we are watching Harry up in the 
> air from Hermione's point of view and that she saw him get
> control of his broom  as she scrambled back along the row of 
> seats. 
> <snip>

Neri:
OK, so it isn't a non-description but because of the ambiguous shifts 
in PoV it isn't clear from the beginning that it isn't a non-
description. 


> Pippin:
> It's the same with that petrificus curse. Harry of course knows
> whether he said the curse or not, and he may or may not know
> who did say it. But the narrator doesn't tell us that he knows,
> it only lets us assume that he does. 
> 

Neri:
It's not the same at all. As you say Harry at the very least *must* 
know if it's him or somebody else, and in addition there aren't any 
ambiguous shifts in PoV here. So whatever you insist on calling the 
broom incident, the petrificus incident is still a much more simple 
and clear-cut case of non-description. 


> Pippin:
>  On revisiting the situation, which must be done 
> because we don't know what happened to Greyback after he 
> fell to the floor, Harry can easily say in fact  he doesn't know
> who did it.  <snip>

Neri:
We know for certain that Greyback was hit by the petrificus totalus, 
so I don't see how not knowing what happened to him later has any 
bearing on the question whether it was Harry or somebody else who got 
him. 

BTW, what happened to Greyback is another non-description, because 
Harry at the very least must know if he was caught or not, while we 
weren't given that information. So I guess it is possible here to 
take the petrificus non-description and the Greyback non-description, 
combine them in some roundabout way and come up with a theory that is 
firmly based on things that we *don't* know. And of course, since the 
number of non-descriptions is huge and the number of possible ways to 
combine them would be astronomical, practically any theory could 
be "supported" this way. I sure hope JKR isn't that unreliable. 

Neri