The Fundamental Message of the HP books?

[lealess]

No: HPFGUIDX 175751

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Jen Reese" wrote:
>
> JudySerenity:
> > I'm not sure if the story got away from JKR, or if it just was 
> > never the story that I thought it was.  Dumbledore in particular 
> > bothered me in DH, as I noted by contrasting his speech in GoF
> > with his actual behavior when a Death Eater wanted to return.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Jen:  
> 
> <snip re Dumbledore's temptation and hubris>
>
> Maybe his words hold even *more* weight because of those struggles, 
> because he's not just giving lip service to the idea of choosing 
> right over easy, he's actually had the experience of choosing easy 
> and seeing the destruction such a choice wrought; he's every parent 
> who urges a child to reconsider a choice to take some action because 
> the parent still holds his/her own memory of pain and suffering when 
> making the same choice once upon a time.  Re: Snape, he's not
> playing the role of the kind, forgiving parent who keeps offering
> second chances and boosting with praise but the critical, demanding
> parent whose seen the fall and demands right action to earn trust
> and forgiveness.  
> 
> In an almost Aristotelian way, Dumbledore believes a person is the 
> sum of his/her choices and he urges Harry and the WW to consider the 
> choices they make when faced with moments that can set a person down 
> one path or another.  Even when succumbing to the temptation of the 
> ring, Dumbledore was able to turn his moment of temptation into a 
> right action by offering Draco the hope of a second-chance (which 
> helped cement Draco's return as one without true loyalty, thus 
> helping Harry on at least two occasions), and Dumbledore ensuring 
> there were those he left behind with enough information needed to 
> carry on the fight.
>
> <snip>
>
> People who fight against evil and desctruction might not live to see 
> the fruits of their labor but whatever choices they've made live on 
> in others who take up the cause.
> 
> Jen

I'm just wondering if you think Dumbledore chose what was right over
what was easy when he asked Snape to kill him, to spare him pain and
humiliation.  Did Dumbledore turn his moment of temptation into a
"right action" by asking Snape to compromise Snape's soul for Draco's
sake?  Snape agreed to do this, not for the sake of Lily's child, but
presumably to keep Draco's soul pure, to help the old man, and to
further the "plan" that Snape later found out Dumbledore had lied to
him about all along.

There was always a cost to Dumbledore's actions.  The cost was Severus
Snape.

Dumbledore tells the returning Death Eater Snape that, "You disgust
me," "You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and
child?  They can die, as long as you have what you want?"  At the end
of his life, though, he does the same thing to Snape.  Snape can go to
hell, for all Dumbledore cares, as long as he agrees to follow the
plan.  So I wonder, was asking this of Snape right, or easy?

lealess