King's Cross Station and DH as Christian Allegory)

[Kristen]

No: HPFGUIDX 173494

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Sherry Gomes <sherriola at ...> 
wrote:
>
> Carol responds:
> Actually, it hasn't been. IIRC, you and I are the only ones who've 
mentioned
> it. "King's Cross" jumped out at me as an obvious allusion to 
Jesus's death
> and resurrection (cross is obvious, especially in connection with 
the cross
> that Harry drew on the, erm, grave of Mad-Eye Moody's eyeball. I 
wondered
> whether "King's" (which, of course, in real life relates to the 
unsaintly
> George IV) was intended to suggest (to Christian readers, at 
least) "Christ
> the King." At any rate, Harry's glimpse of the afterlife (and the 
dead but
> healed Dumbledore once again wearing his benevolent facade) in what 
Harry
> interpreted to be a version of King's Cross Station (obviously not 
the real,
> earthly one) immediately confirmed what I already suspected:
> Harry was a Christ figure (not to be confused with Christ himself, 
whether
> you're Christian or not) who has "died" (entered the afterlife, 
passed
> through the veil) but is not really dead and will be resurrected. 
> 
> 
> Sherry:
> 
> Laughing at myself here, but I didn't get any Christian, or Christ 
Figure
> feeling out of King's cross.  I just thought it made perfect sense 
for Harry
> to find himself there in this moment.  King's Cross is the place 
that has
> always meant going somewhere, going to Hogwarts or going back to the
> Dursleys.  It's the place of departure to the place he considered 
home,
> Hogwarts.  I thought, well, if he's going to have a sort of way 
station to
> get the last details or to make a decision to move on or go back, 
that
> station is the place I could most easily imagine Harry thinking 
of.  I must
> be a simplistic reader, because that's all there was to it for me.
> 
> Sherry
>
Hexicon:  A couple of days before DH came out, hpfan_mom posted this 
unbelievably prescient quotation from Howard's End. (Is that book 
perhaps a known favorite of JKR?)  I thought this quote was very 
interesting in light of the "King's Cross" chapter.  The name of the 
station is a gift, because one can read it many ways--as a religious 
metaphor, as Harry's gateway to Hogwarts, or in the manner described 
by Forster and called to our attention by the previous poster.

hpfan_mom said in message 172064:
Joined the library reading club this summer to kill time while
waiting for July 21. Came across this passage from Chapter 2 of
Howards End, by E.M. Forster:
_____
"Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had
strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our
gates to the glorious and the unknown. . . .

To Margaret--I hope that it will not set the reader against her--the
station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity. Its very
situation--withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St.
Pancras--implied a comment on the materialism of life. Those two
great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an
unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure, whose
issue might be prosperous, but would certainly not be expressed in
the ordinary language of prosperity."