What turned Snape (Was: JKR site update SPOILERS)

[Neri]

No: HPFGUIDX 159052

> 
> Carol responds:
> But Snape "returned to our side" before Godric's Hollow and was spying
> for Dumbledore "at great personal risk" before he was hired as Potions
>  Master several months before the Potters died (probably in July or
> August of that year; he would have begun teaching September 1.) So the
> life debt doesn't explain why he turned against Voldemort or why
> Dumbledore trusts him. All it explains is why he would regret James's
> death and try to save Harry in Book 1. 

Neri:
This sounds strange. Dumbledore says that Snape's debt to James is
what made Snape try saving Harry in SS/PS. So you think his debt to
James would make Snape try to save Harry but *not* James? I don't get
your logic here.  

Although the discussion "what turned Snape" is a lot of fun and also a
great TBay tradition, after HBP we can't even be sure that Snape had
turned at all. What we do know is that Voldemort himself sent Snape to
Hogwarts to spy after Dumbledore (and this isn't just a Spinner's End
"half-truth" because Bellatrix had known about it before). So Snape
"returning to our side... at great personal risk" might be exactly
what Voldemort had ordered him to do in the first place – to pretend
that he turned and feed Dumbledore with worthless information. It
appears that Snape was then already a double and possibly triple
agent, slithering out of action on the Dark Lord's orders, playing
both sides against the other and somehow managing to stay alive by the
end of the war and even secure a nice post, while many of his comrades
(on both sides!) ended up dead, feeding the dementors in Azkaban,
permanently insane, merely unemployed and cast out, retiring with
their remaining body parts or going underground as a rat. 

We only know about one true piece of information Snape apparently told
Dumbledore about Voldy before GH (and even this one is only an
assumption, not canon): that Voldy knows the first half of the
prophecy and is after the Potters. So in fact the only thing we can be
moderately sure of is that Snape did try to save the Potters, and the
Potters specifically. 


> Carol:
> But Dumbledore values choice and IMO he would not trust Snape because
> Snape was under some compulsion.

Neri:
Hmm. I think you have to listen more carefully to what Dumbledore has
to say about choices. It's quite an interesting coincidence that Harry
asks him this very question in the most thematic part of HBP: 

*******************************************************
HBP, Ch. 23, p.511:
"But, sir," said Harry, making valiant efforts not to sound
argumentative, "it all comes to the same thing, doesn't it? I've got
to try and kill him, or —"

"Got to?" said Dumbledore. "Of course you've got to! But not because
of the prophecy! Because you, yourself, will never rest until you've
tried!

Ibid, p. 512:
But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him.
It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the
arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with
your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was
little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew — and so do
I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents —
that there was all the difference in the world.
*******************************************************

Dumbledore knows that Harry "got to" try and defeat Voldemort. Harry
is *compelled* to fight Voldemort, in the sense that Voldemort is
forcing him to do it or die. But still, Dumbledore wants Harry to
choose to fight Voldemort from his own free will.

I suspect that this is exactly the critical part that Snape doesn't
understand, and the part Dumbledore had hoped all along that he would.
Dumbledore had hoped for genuine remorse. He hoped that Snape would
save Harry from his own free will, not because he "got to". I think
this is what Dumbledore pleaded for Snape to do on the tower, for
Snape's sake and not for Dumbledore's or Harry's sake. But Snape had
thought he could repay the debt without genuine remorse and still keep
all his options open. Which, since this is magic "in its deepest, most
impenetrable", practically ensured that Snape would fail throughout
the series in getting rid of the blasted debt. But at the very least
Dumbledore had known all along that Snape "got to" save Harry, in the
same sense that Harry got to face Voldemort. To use the terms that
Harry prefers to put it in, if Snape won't choose to enter this arena
with his head held high, then he *will* be dragged into it. It's the
nature of the magic and the nature of JKR's main theme. So Dumbledore
at least could trust Snape to arrive at his fated arena on time and do
what he got to, by his own choice or not. 

Neri