Deathly Hallows Reaction - Could do Better, Sorry

[muscatel1988]

No: HPFGUIDX 172325

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03" 
> Wishful 
thinking I'm afraid.  No healing for the WW.  Where Anne 
> Frank was able to look at the world around her and think, "I know 
in 
> my heart that people are good" (or words to that effect), JKR 
> apparently looks at the world around her and thinks, "I know in my 
> heart that a quarter of the people out there are evil, half of 
them 
> are okay, and there's one quarter that's just unquestionably good."
> 
> It's an ugly view of the world in my opinion.  And it cumlminates 
in 
> a rather ugly book with a rather ugly message.  Yeah.  I'm pretty 
> much done with the series.

I'm not sure that I would go quite as far as that, but your post 
reminds me of a lot of things that I've been thinking recently.

Specifically, I thought during HBP that JKR had blown the moral 
arc.  So much of what had gone before had been predicated on 
Dumbledore's "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, 
far more than our abilities."  That was, at the time, the supreme 
moral lesson of the books, and Harry was the embodiment, the 
intended embodiment, of that lesson.

Then we reached Tom Riddle's back story, and choice was at every 
turn undermined: he was, in his creator's words, a sociopath.  His 
ancestry and the circumstances of his birth were what had made him 
what he was, and, crucially, we were shown no point where he made 
the choice.  Since all he is is what we were shown, for the moral 
lesson to hold water after that we needed to read that choice.  JKR 
chose not to provide it, and in doing so, dealt a terrible blow to 
what she had herself claimed to be doing.  I'm not saying that an 
author has to be morally consistent - I'm saying that if we are led 
to expect it, we have have a right to do so: we don't mind Jeffrey 
Archer's lack of a moral framework, but we would be right to object 
if George Eliot dismissed hers.

So we came to DH, and we find the White Hats casting Unforgivables 
with ease.  They were shocking in GoF because they were palpably and 
instinctively evil.  Harry's attempt at one at the end of OotP 
underscored the point - it is not in our hero's nature to hate 
enough.  Two books on, and it now is.  (There is also a technical 
problem - spells are not simply knowing what you want to do and 
waving your wand.  Ron's failure to turn Scabbers yellow and his 
difficulty with Wingardium Leviosa, and much of the Potions book 
storyline, tell us that spells must be learnt.  How then can Harry, 
and the others, cast the Unforgivables by desire alone, never having 
learnt them?)

"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more 
than our abilities."  That sentence is, for me, the judgement on 
Dumbledore.  His overarching choice was to raise Harry as a pig for 
slaughter.  Snape recoils at the idea; it is hard not to.

So I think my unease during HBP was warranted.  There is no coherent 
moral universe here, and I was led to believe there was.

There was one motif that appeared first just after Harry's sorting, 
though, and it was wonderfully maintained.  'It happened very 
suddenly.  The hook-nosed teacher looked past Quirrell's turban 
straight into Harry's eyes - '(PS (UK, 94), which blew past me not 
once but twice, and it ends with "Look...at...me" (DH (UK, 528).  
And we remember Snape trying fruitlessly to teach Harry 
Occlumency, forced to stare into those eyes for hour after hour, and 
reading in them only dislike.  That's good, that's very good.  Poor 
Snape.

That said, it's been a helluva ride, and I enjoyed most of it 
hugely.  Thanks, Jo. 

And from this poster, who's only posted here a couple of times 
before, but lurked often, thank you to all of you.  You've made me 
think and you've made me laugh.