Of Souls and Death - Dumbledore's Intent

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 148974

Miles wrote:
> > Just to put another question into the discussion: Why don't we
dive into the pensieve to listen to the prophecy? Why don't we hear
any sounds apart from Trelawny's voice in the memory version
Dumbledore presents to Harry (and to us)?
> 
Geoff responded:
> I often find that if I am concentrating on, say, a conversation in a
noisy environment, I subconsciously filter out background noise and 
often don't even remember that a CD player or something of that ilk
was blasting away behind me.
> 
> If Dumbledore was concentrating hard on what Trelawney was 
prophesying, he may have been doing the same. No clinking of empty 
glasses or bawdy bar-room songs from the main area, no thuds of 
bodies being ejected... Just Sybill holding forth.

Carol responds:
But the whole point of a Pensieve is that it presents an objective
record of a memory, including what the perceiver filtered out at the
time or has since forgotten, without any of the subconscious changes
that we make to our own memories when we recall them to ourselves.
IOW, it acts as a *sieve* to filter out subjectivity. So the figure of
Sibyll rising from the Pensieve has nothing to do with DD's level of
concentration and everything to do with what she really said and how
she really appeared.

However, to answer Miles's question, DD has made a conscious choice to
show *only* the Prophecy without its context. Rather than taking Harry
with him into the Pensieve, he uses the much more efficient method of
having Trelawney rise from the bowl (as Bertha Jorkins and SS do in
other scenes). Why? Because DD wants Harry to hear the Prophecy
without the distraction of seeing young Snape as the eavesdropper. DD
is withholding that information from Harry--and JKR is withholding it
from the reader.

I agree, however, that DD's version of what happened does not match
Trelawney's, and I have yet to hear a convincing explanation for young
Snape's presence to be known to Trelawney if he was evicted from the
bar halfway through the Prophecy as DD claims.

Carol, hoping that JKR will convincingly reconcile the two versions
without making DD a liar or implicating him in the Potters' deaths