Epilogue Bashing

[wickywackywoo2001]

No: HPFGUIDX 173011

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "littleleahstill" <leahstill at ...> 
wrote:
 I 
> don't want to repeat what I've posted a few times but we just do not 
> deal with the House problem, with the Slytherin problem; you still 
> don't choose to go into Slytherin, so why is it still there? Then 
> there is social justice, which is raised throughout the series, but 
> is not dealt with adequately.
> 
It seemed to me to give a false impression of what is possible after a 
seriously damaging war.  Things do not just "go back to normal", even 
after some years.  I expected to see a changed world.  Rowling made 
great use of Nazi Germany parallels; this was as if WWII ended, and the 
Germans went right back to admiring militarism and marching and 
uniforms and excessive adulation of strong leaders.  You can't go 
through a war and not come out questioning what led to it.  Tolkien 
grasped that - even though the Shire is repaired at the end of LOTR, 
it's never quite the same, and people just have to accept that some 
things have been lost for good.

In fact, I thought that one of the permanent results of Voldemort's 
reign of terror would be that the Sorting Hat was destroyed - I thought 
that was half the point of it bursting into flames on Neville's head.  
Not just to punish him, but to destroy the link to the past.  After 
all, Voldemort had just announced that he was abolishing all the other 
houses, so nobody would be sorted ever again.  Instead, we're right 
back to the same old stupid sorting into classes that was part of the 
problem from the beginning.  

> And finally. The epilogue is in my opinion, one of the most badly 
> written parts of the entire seven books.  JKR can do famuly scenes 
> brilliantly, this one (apart from the Severus moment) was just banal.
> 
I've read books and interviews by successful writers, and one thing 
many of them said which always struck me as silly was "If you've 
written a phrase or a paragraph that you think is especially brilliant 
and indispensible, RIP IT OUT."  It turns out they were right.  This 
epilogue was apparently written long ago, and carefully cherished; 
Rowling was bound and determined to have it in, no matter what, and we 
see the results.  It stinks, and I think if she hadn't been so 
emotionally attached to it, she would have realized how inferior it is.

Wanda