Said creature under the bench..

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 176043

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "doddiemoemoe"
<doddiemoemoe at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> So now I'm confused, only because it hasn't been bought up yet..
> 
> JKR says that Harry is no longer a parseltongue...
> 
> What's right? Harry no longer being a parsel tongue because of said 
> Being under the bench...or Voldie's last piece of soul hence his 
> last bit is in nagini?
> 

Ken:

It is a confusing matter and I suspect the author is a bit confused
herself. But now that canon is complete I tend to go with canon as
much as possible. Canon may not explain everything and we still have
the problems of unreliable narrators and characters who are simply
mistaken so some things might remain ambiguous forever.

Harry had a bit of Voldemort's soul inside him. That made him a
Horcrux and it gave him some of Voledmort's abilities and it gave him
a remarkable window into Voldemort's mind that he apparently could
neither block nor even detect. There are parts of that prophecy that I
still cannot rectify with events but Voldemort certainly did mark
Harry as his equal. That soul bit was extremely helpful to Harry in DH
for the window it gave him into Voldemort's activities and thoughts.
Voldemort literally gave him the power to defeat him and it was a
power that he knew not of.

In the train station Dumbledore says that Harry's little bit of soul
was destroyed. It is gone and with it went Harry's portion of
Voldemort's power. Since it is gone Harry cannot speak Parseltongue
for example. When it went Harry also loses his window into Voldemort's
mind. That is why in the final confrontation Harry is not reading
Voldemort's thoughts to determine what he will do next and when.
Instead Harry relies on a very old trick that normal humans practice:
he messes with his opponent's mind to goad him into acting in the way
Harry wants him to and to control the moment when he takes that
action. Harry's verbal taunts cause Voldemort to lose control and
telegraph his intentions. Harry is like the cat who knows where the
mouse will appear, where it will go, and when it will appear. The
mouse never really had a chance.

The way I read it there was no creature under the bench, no
Dumbledore, no naked Harry, and no King's Cross station. Dumbledore
tells Harry that it is both real and all in his head. If it is in his
head then it is not physically real. It is real in the sense that it
is a true experience. Harry was communicating with the real Dumbldore
who has passed on to the next life. He isn't talking with an echo or
an uncanny analog, he is talking with Dumbldore as we have always
known Dumbldore. The things that Dumbldore tells him are the truth, or
his well educated guess when he admits he is guessing. The things that
Harry "sees" are true representations of the next life. Physical
defects are healed. Spiritual defects are not.

There is no creature and no bench. What Harry sees is akin to what
Ebenezer Scrooge saw when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showed
him where he was heading, and also like what he saw of Jacob Marley's
state in the afterlife. The primary purpose of this life is to take
care for your eternal soul. Voldemort has taken no care for his soul,
he considers spiritual matters beneath him. If Voldemort dies as he
was at that moment then he will become that pitiful creature that
Harry saw when he passes to the next life. That creature is not the
soul bit that was destroyed, that creature is all that will be left of
Voldemort to carry on in the next life unless he repents of his deeds
before he dies. Harry is shown this so that he will offer Voldemort a
way out in his final moments on Earth. Voldemort refused, of course,
and chose his own doom. He who considered himself the greatest living
humans will become the least of all creatures in the afterlife. The
first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Neither Harry nor Dumbledore are being cruel when they fail to try to
help the creature. Dumbledore does not rule the Universe, he does not
set the rules. What you see is an echo, at least, of Christian
theology. You have a continuous opportunity to alter the future state
of your soul from birth until the moment you die. Once you die, you
are what you are for all eternity. There is no help for the creature
under the bench either in Harry's vision or in the afterlife that
Voldemort faces. He is beyond help. Help could only have come to him
while he walked the Earth. He had many opportunities to rectify his
soul and he spurned them all. Lily and James (at least) showed him in
their moments of death the love and compassion that he needed. He
would not listen and now he is lost forever. 

Harry was given a choice to pass on or to return to this life. He
chose to return and one of the things that he did upon his return is
to hold out a hand of salvation, one last time, to his mortal and
detestable enemy. Voldemort was given a chance very few will get and
still he refused it. That simple gesture by Harry was one of the most
noble acts you will ever see. It's a different thread really but for
me the Harry that came to the understanding and compassion it took to
try to rescue Voldemort from his own horrific future has moved way
beyond being an auror. In terms of magical skill Voldemort reached a
plane that no other achieved and as Harry says the few others who
might have, knew better than. Harry reached an equal height, but in
the dimension of spirituality. I don't know what that makes him in the
WW but in the Muggle world he bids fair to be a Saint.

Ken