Death, where is thy victory? (Was: The Message of DH)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 174753

Julie wrote:
> 
> > We (at least many of us) *wanted* to see the series end with the
Good Guys showing moral superiority over the Bad Guys, even though
they generally failed to do so throughout the previous books.
> 
houyhnhnm replied:
> 
> That is what I wanted, too.  The story *seemed* to be about good and
evil and how to live your life.  Lately I have been wondering if the
theme Rowling was really persuing was not how to live, but how to die.

Carol responds:
As I said offlist, now we're getting somewhere! And while I *do* think
that the story shows the triumph of a mostly good but flawed young man
over an unquestionably evil wizard, who didn't see that coming? Maybe
good vs. evil isn't the chief conflict that we're dealing with. What
besides power was Voldemort preoccupied with? What was he chiefly
afraid of? What were the Horcruxes, those supremely unnatural
creations, beyond the "usual evil," supposed to protect him from?
Death? And what do the epigraphs from Aeschylus and William Penn deal
with? Death.
> 
houyhnhnm: 
> Although she apparantly conceived the idea of an orphaned boy who
finds out he's a wizard, before her mother's death, the work was begun
in earnest after the death.  Maybe Harry's journey turned into
Rowling's, struggling with the idea of death, fear of one's own death
and fear of loss of loved ones by death.  In other words, HP is not
the story of a boy wizard struggling with evil but a grown woman
struggling with her own mortality. <snip>
> 
Carol:
Or, in terms of the books, especially DH, characters facing their own
mortality. It's different for Harry, in particular, to be out actively
hunting down LV's Horcruxes, knowing that each one brings the final
struggle closer, than it was at Hogwarts, knowing that he was safe as
long as Dumbledore was alive. He can't rely on Dumbledore now, as
either an advisor or a shield. He has to face his own mortality (as
Regulus, that other Seeker, also did). Harry doesn't yet know that he
has to sacrifice himself; it's still murder or be murdered until "The
Prince's Tale." And then he has to get over the idea that he's a pig
to be slaughtered, betrayed by the man he thought was his mentor, and
go willingly to his death. (Was no one but me moved to tears when he
opened the Snitch with the words, "I am about to die"?)

Harry has always seen Dumbledore as the wise old mentor. Now he knows
that Dumbledore, too, lost loved ones and would like nothing better
than to have them back. I think he feels almost as guilty for Ariana's
death as Snape does for Lily's. DD understands exactly what Harry sees
in the Mirror of Erised because he sees much the same thing, a dead
loved one or loved ones. (Even the relationship with his brother,
whose role was so excitedly anticipated by posters on this list but
who is now being ignored or overlooked, was ruined.) 

houyhnhnm:
> I don't think my attitude towards death is very much like Rowling's.
 Although I am afraid of death, I doubt if I share either her
indignation at its existence or her certainty that it can be overcome.
 I've always thought that right way to deal with death lies in living
properly in this world and making the right moral choices.  What lies
on the other side (if anything) will takes care of itself when and if
we get there.
>
Carol:
But I don't think that's what the books show about death, so we need
to look at it as her characters experience it or will experience.
Whatever the case in RL, and we can't know where our dead loved ones
have gone and whether we'll ever see them again, we can only hope or
believe or resign ourselves to the impossibility of knowing, but in
all of the HP books, the soul has been presented as real and the
afterlife has been hinted at by the horrific worse-than-death fate of
the soul sucked. NHN's "he will have gone one," the Veil in the DoM,
DD's view of death as "the next great adventure" contrasted with
Voldemort's horror of death and his willingness to split his soul
through murder and commit other unnatural acts ("bone of the father"
in a resurrection potion) because he feared a natural and inevitable
phenomenon. The Deathly Hallows, whose lure DD could not resist, would
have made Harry Master of Death, but being a better man than
Dumbledore, he rejects them, tossing the broken resurrection stone to
the ground. (It might have been better to destroy it, but I'll let
that drop.)

Harry visits his parents' grave for the first time and misreads the
biblical quotation, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death"
as something the Death Eaters might think. Hermione (did her parents
attend church with her when she was a child?) corrects him. "It means
. . . living beyond death. Living after death." 

Harry's reaction is something like despair: "But they were not living,
thought Harry. They were gone. The empty words [unreliable narrator
again] could not disguise the fact that his parents' mouldering
remains lay beneath snow and stone, indifferent, unknowing. And tears
came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on
his face. . . . He let them fall . . . looking down at the thick snow
hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay,
bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living
son stood so near . . . and close to wishing that his he was sleeping
under the snow with them" (DH Am. ed. 328).

Ironically, Harry is standing in a churchyard as he thinks these
words, the joy and beauty of a Christmas service celebrating the birth
of Christ only yards away from him. (Forgive me if you're not
Christian and are unmoved by this idea; I'm trying to recreate what I
think is JKR's perspective as a Christian writer.)

Earlier, Hermione has told them about Horcruxes being the opposite of
a human being, with the soul bit depending on the existence of its
container to avoid annihilation whereas in a human being the body may
die, but the soul is eternal. Harry is only aware at this moment of
the death of the body, of his own loss, whose enormousness he now
seems to recognize for the first time. He is not far from the young
Snape, anguishing over Lily's death and wishing he were dead, too, or
from Aberforth, still, after much longer than Snape's brief lifetime,
 mourning Ariana: "DON'T!' bellowed Snape. 'Gone . . . . dead. . . . I
wish . . . I wish *I* were dead" (678). 'Gone,' croaked Aberforth.
'Gone forever'" (567).

But Albus Dumbledore, wiser if not better than his younger brother,
had already told Harry, "The dead that we love never really leave us."
And Harry, entering King's Cross Station in his mind but nevertheless
seeing what is real and true (DD's last words as Harry comes back to
himself), sees that there is an afterlife, with redemption for
Dumbledore, nothing to fear for himself, and an eternal of helpless
suffering for Voldemort, whose eternal form so closely resembles the
fetal form we witnessed in GoF. The shades of his parents and Black
and Lupin reinforce the view that death is nothing to fear. "Do not
pity the dead. Pity the living, especially those who live without love."

We don't see what happens to those who "go on." JKR herself can't know
and Dumbledore, consequently, can't tell. But in JKR's vision, as in
any Christian writer's, death is not the end of everything. The soul
lives on. Only the unrepentant need fear eternity.

Carol, happily envisioning mutual forgiveness among Snape, Lily, and
the Maruaders minus Peter