Harry's death

[dananotdayna]

No: HPFGUIDX 171474

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.
>

Carol responded:
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.


Dana adds:
I agree with Carol.
The other difficulty with this comparison is that Harry is
characterized as being thrust by fate into his "race" as often as he
is characterized as someone who chooses to compete.  The athlete
dying young is only glorious if said athlete is doing something he
wanted to do and freely chose to do.  Otherwise it is just tragic.

There are so many things that we still don't know about the big
picture that make depicting Harry's death appropriate or
inappropriate pretty much impossible at this point (which is great,
actually).  It still isn't exactly clear to me the point Rowling is
trying to make.  But... my gut feeling is that she's less interested
in this image of "perfection" than in saying something about truth
(and how it's not always pretty), love (and how it's not usually
easy), and choices (and the ripples that our choices send out into
the world).

If Dumbledore is the master manipulator that some of the details
seem to indicate; if he knowingly participated in the leak of the
prophecy, then Harry's death would be a travesty.  If, on the other
hand, we find out a more acceptable reason for Dumbledore's failure
to tell the whole truth to Harry about everything before he died,
then we can see Harry's story without the puppetmaster shadow cast
over it, and a self-sacrificing hero's death might be in order.

We don't know the truth about Snape either.  If he fails to live up
to Dumbledore's belief in his loyalty, a death for Harry won't
resonate (for me).  Harry hates him, and a successfully heroic death
defeating the villain with the Ultimate Power of Love just won't
make any sense if Harry hasn't changed his mind or forgiven him.
Think of how vile Umbridge is in the scene where she's admiting the
horrid things she did to persecute Harry and she rationalizes her
evil because she claims she's serving the greater good.  That kind
of hypocrisy is nauseating, and Harry prioritizing revenge on Snape
over everything else is similarly disturbing.

I'm less interested in whether or not Harry dies than in whether or
not he grows up finally and makes choices on this last leg of his
journey that are fully informed rather than going about half-cocked
and swelled with passionate need to get even with Snape - or
Voldemort.  Voldemort needs to be neutralized for everyone's sake,
not just Harry's.  I'm hoping that whoever dies in DH, the deaths
will be a catalyst to help Harry reach the maturity his mother had.

Dana,
who would prefer Snape's death to Hagrid's,
Hagrid's death to Lupin or Tonks,
Lupin or Tonks death to Arthur or Molly's
Arthur or Molly's death to Fred or George's,
Fred or George's death to Ginny's,
Ginny's death to Ron or Hermione's,
Harry's maturity and meaningful survival to his sacrificicial death,
and Harry's sacrificial and thematically resonate death to an ending
as innocuous and empty as Dumbledore's Erised vision of socks