Harry dies?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 171423

Bruce Alan Wilson wrote:
>
> Do you remember Houseman's poem "To an Athlete Dieing Young".  It
tells of a young man who drops dead on the finish line as he wins an
important race. Houseman says that the young man is lucky because
he'll always be the winner--he'll never loose, he'll never get old and
fat, he'll never become a has-been.  I think that there is something
to that if Harry should die in the process of or the aftermath of
defeating Voldemort.  We'd not see Harry getting a big head from his
celebrity.  We'd never see Harry getting bored because, like
Alexander, he had no more worlds to conquer.  We never see Harry
turning into someone like Ludo Bagman, trading on his ever-more-wilted
laurels.  We never see him becoming old and forgotten, boring his
grandkids and their friends with stories of How I Defeated the Dark Lord.
> 
> All that being said, I too hope that Harry will survive and thrive.

Carol responds:
The athlete dying young, forever victorious, has already been done.

"'He suffered very little then,' [Mrs. Diggory] said when Harry had
told her how he died. 'And after all, Amos . . . he died just when
he'd won the tournament. He must have been happy'" (GoF Am. ed. 716,
ellipsis in original).

I don't think JKR will repeat Cedric's sad fate with Harry. I agree
that Harry will survive and thrive, and (IMO)  the fickle WW will
forget how much it owes to him once it's safe.

Carol, who can hardly bear to read Amos Diggory's references to
Cedric's imagined grandchildren earlier in the book