[HPforGrownups] Re: rec: Missing from 'Harry Potter' a real moral struggle

[Feng Zengkun]

No: HPFGUIDX 173459

Feng Zengkun <nightmasque@> (well, that's me) wrote:
>  
> > > Harry has no inner struggle - the
> > > choices he has to make are easy because
> > > everything is so black and white for him.
> > > In this respective, there is no 'moral
> > > struggle' for Harry to grapple with: his
> > > options are to defeat Voldemort or not,
> > > and that choice is ridiculously easy to make. 
> 


Eggplant wrote: 
 
> > Ridiculously easy?! It's easy to march into the
> Forbidden Forest to 
> > be murdered by a maniac? What Harry did was moral
> and as you read 
> > his thoughts as he walked to his doom it sure
> seemed to be a 
> > struggle to me. It takes no courage to know what
> the right thing to 
> > do is, but it can be a struggle to actually do it.
> I read that 
> > article yesterday and I still can't make heads or
> tails of it.
> 
> 


Feng again:

No, no, I'm afraid you misunderstood me (and the
article). I'm not saying that Harry has no morals or
morality; I think we have two different definitions of
the topic here.

What I'm saying (and what I believe the article was
saying) was that the choices are easy for Harry
because they are black and white. There is no shade of
gray here; defeating Voldemort is the right thing to
do, no matter how hard it might be. It's easy for
Harry because he knows that that is the 'right' thing
to do, so to speak.

Compare this to, say, Dumbledore's situation (before
GoF, at any rate). If he wants Voldemort defeated, he
has to sacrifice a young boy. This is a moral
struggle: do you allow an evil wizard to live so that
a boy you love can live as well, or do you sacrifice
the latter to defeat the former? I'm sure you can
appreciate that this is a vastly more difficult choice
to make, because there is no 'right' answer here.

The same with LotR: do you allow magic to continue
existing and risk its abuse, or do you take magic out
of equation completely and not give people a choice?

These are the 'moral struggles' I was talking about:
Dumbledore and Frodo and all the other classic series
comprise some really difficult choices, because there
is no real 'right' answer, and this creates the 'moral
struggle'. Whereas for Harry the answer has been
straightforward all along, and the choices easy to
make. He has to kill himself, yes, but that's not the
same as, say, if he had to kill Ron and Hermoine in
order to defeat Voldemort - /that/ would have a 'moral
struggle'.

I hope that clarifies things.