Off-page Snape (Was: Character construction)

[houyhnhnm102]

No: HPFGUIDX 174934

Shelley:

> Says who? Ok, for those that already had worked out a 
> redemption plan in their heads for Snape long before 
> reading this book, all they were looking for was a 
> confirmation that their theory was correct. Those 
> people weren't directly looking for all the backup 
> and supporting details of such a conclusion probably 
> didn't even notice that anything was missing. 

houyhnhnm:

Although I was a DDM!Snaper, I was not a LOLLIPOPS adherent.  
The Snape whose story I finally learned in DH was not the 
Snape I thought I knew.  Snape's backstory came as a 
complete surprise to me.  Harry's acceptance of it, 
which I couldn't even imagine before DH, did seem abrupt. 
Here is why it worked for me.

First, Harry has already been presented as someone with 
very little psychological inertia once he accepts 
discrepant facts.  He went from wanting to kill Sirius 
to being willing to die for him all in the space of a 
few hours.  (The fact that this took place in the 
Shrieking Shack, the same place where Harry received 
Snape's memories is no coincidence, IMO.)

Secondly, as I pointed out in Message #174279,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/174279
we *see* Harry actively empathizing with Snape as he 
is viewing the memories.   It is no stretch for me to 
believe that Harry could go on from empathizing with  
Snape as a young adolescent suffering under a hopeless 
crush to empathizing with Snape as a grown man caught 
between his loyalty to Dumbledore and his resentment 
that he is not trusted enough to be told the truth.  
I think Snape's frustration at being kept in the dark 
is something Harry would have immediately identified with.

He comes to understand Snape's brand of courage because 
he experiences it for himself on his walk into the forest 
to face Voldemort. "This cold-blooded walk to his own 
destruction would require a different kind of bravery." 
A Slytherin kind of bravery actually, very different from 
hot-blooded Gryffindor daring and chivalry.

If we still needed it at this point, there is Harry's 
near death experience in "King's Cross" in which he 
doesn't need his glasses because all the scales have 
finally fallen from his eyes and he can see clearly.

Finally, there is gratitude.  Jane Austen wrote of 
Elizabeth Bennet that, "If gratitude and esteem are 
good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's change of 
sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty." Harry 
has two reasons for gratitude to Snape.  Snape gave him 
the thing he wanted so desperately that no one else 
would give him:  The truth.  And Snape gave Harry his 
mother, just as Sirius had given him his father.  Snape 
had known Lily longer than anyone else (except Petunia) 
and in a way no one else had known her.  For all of 
Slughorn's unctious praise, I never felt I knew Lily 
and I don't think Harry did either.  After reading
"The Prince's Tale" Lily was at last real for me and 
I think for Harry also.

So, although Snape's story did not turn out to be as 
I had envisioned it and though I still have some 
problems with other aspects of DH, the resolution 
of the Snape-Harry conflict was one thing that was 
believable and satisfying to me.