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

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 155989

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:

> Other examples:
> Quirrell tells an unconvincing story about his turban. 
> Scabbers inexplicably falls asleep after the fight with Goyle.
> Fake!Moody says Crouch disappeared from the map. 
> Kreacher tells an unconvincing story about where he was over Christmas.
> 
> These sneaky bits are never followed up on, and seem to have no
> purpose, in retrospect, except to warn us that the character was not
> to be taken at face value.
> 
> The narrator pulls a similar trick, telling us that Harry's parents died
> in a car crash. It's fishy because we already know that they seem
> to have been killed in a place called Godric's Hollow by someone 
> called Voldemort. Sure enough, it turns out we can't take the 
> narrator at face value either. The narration shuttles seamlessly
> between one character's seeming reality and another's, and does
> not always let us know when a character's seeming reality has
> strayed from the objective reality of the books. However, by using
> the other rules to look for hints,  IMO we can try to guess when it has
> done so. 
> 
> Pippin
>  melting in California

Geoff:
I'm not quite sure this "similar trick" is the same. It may be fishy because /we/ already 
know about Godric's Hollow but this is not an unconvincing story from Harry's perspective. 

'The only thing Harry liked about his own appearance was a very thin scar on his forehead 
which was shaped like a bolt of lightning. He had had it as long as he could remember and 
the first question he could ever remember asking his Aunt Petunia was how he had got it.

"In the car crash when your parents died," she had said. "And don't ask questions."'
(PS "The Vanishing Glass" p.20 UK edition)

This was sufficient to keep Harry satisfied until Hagrid appeared on the scene and hence 
was not liable to raise doubts in Harry's mind as the instances cited above might well have 
done.

Geoff
(also melting in the West of England at 32 Centigrade today)