Character construction (Was: Re: DH as Christian Allegory)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 174807

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "lizzyben04" <lizzyben04 at ...> wrote:


> lizzyben:
> 
> It's sort of amusing to me to see JKR's fruitless battles with 
> Snape.  Despite everything, despite her dislike, Snape started to 
> take over the series. In HBP, he became the most vital, compelling 
> character while the actual heroes became more superficial & boring. 
> As we now know, the ending was always supposed to involve Harry 
> beating Voldemort while the world cheers, so Snape's prominence 
> became a definite problem. This nasty unlikeable man has more fans 
> than her heros! What's wrong with people? Right, Snape is staying 
> off-page in DH. 


I somehow doubt that Rowling was thinking so specifically about
annoying fandom here, although it's clear that she pays some attention
to what people think.

What's always been interesting to me as a reader of this series is to
see how people react to characters, and Snape is easily the most
interesting object here, because he's not developed in the way that
the Trio as the undoubted main character(s) of the books are.

Whenever I go back and read what Rowling actually wrote, after being
submerged in discussion groups, I'm always surprised at how *little*
of Snape there actually is in the books.  Page-time, he doesn't get
that much.  Harry is built as a character through a lot of page time,
access to his thoughts, etc.  Snape was built as a character by hints
and a whole lot of refusal to give out information.  At the end, we
get the information that we were missing, and it's remarkably focused
on a single cause.

The problem and glory of this is that it then encourages each reader
to build their own mental Snape.  This is glorious because it's
successful in engaging the reader, leading to elaboration and
speculation.  It's problematic because each person builds his own idea
on a remarkably small amount of material, which starts to make
discussion difficult--I probably don't share your mental image of
Snape, you don't share mine, but what we can point to in the text to
gain common ground is not that much.

Partially because it's not that much, I think a lot of people expected
there to be more going on in the end than there was.  There's no way
that Rowling, in the series "Harry Potter and the...", could have
possibly come up with something  to match the extremely complicated
character fandom had created out of mutually exclusive possibilities.

Someone once posted a "Snape flowchart".  It was a thing of beauty. 
Of course,  99% of it is now superfluous...

I will happily admit that for myself, the nexus of issues surrounding
Snape has been the most interesting to discuss, over the years.  But I
don't think there's as much to him as Harry, by any means.

-Nora gets cracking through the archives