Voldemort: "Myself am hell" (Was: That ugly baby thing)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 173668

Sandra Collins wrote:

> > Having put down the book after reading the King's Cross chapter
again, I still don't get the whole ugly baby thing. From what I've 
read of the many many many enjoyable, varied and informative posts
regarding a wide raft of subjects to do with the book, is how
Voldermort was meant to be an ugly baby under a bench. I don't
understand the symbolism or maybe the reality? Could anyone enlighten
me as to what it all meant because it's all been lost on me. I go
along with Geoff's line (always good to read your views, Mr
Bannister!) on it being a brief near-death experience for Harry,
that's how I read it in the first place, but the baby made it 
unpleasant reading and I still don't get it.
<snip>
>  
Cariad replied:
> yes that scene disturbed me too Sandra. I don't get what the ugly 
baby was all about either. Like you and Geoff I subscribe to the near-
death experience theory, a moment in earth-bound time and space but 
one in which Harry 'sees the light'. My take on the 'creature' was 
that it was symbolic of evil, DD said that it was beyond help. 
Despite that the 'creature' was pleading and seemed remorseful, it 
was whining and totally disturbed. Maybe it wasn't vocalising it well,
but it made me feel very uncomfortable that it was being ignored. I
don't know what it is, good or bad? Voldemorts soul? the Harry
horcrux? it just leaves a bad taste.
><snip> 
> cariad.

Carol responds:
A lot of people are arguing that it's the bit of Voldemort's soul from
Harry's scar, but I don't think so. Hermione, who has read about
Horcruxes in "Secrets of the Darkest Art," tells Harry and Ron that a
Horcrux is the complete opposite of a human being. Killing a person's
body doesn't kill his soul, which will "survive untouched." But "the
fragment of soul inside a Horcrux is dependent on its container, its
enchanted body, for survival. It can't exist without it" (DH Am. ed.
104). IOW, the soul bits are utterly obliterated when the Horcrux
containing them is destroyed. In the case of Harry's scar, it's an
accidental Horcrux over which no encasing spell has been performed, so
there's no enchanted body that needs to be destroyed. 

But Dumbledore tells Harry that the soul bit was destroyed when it was
released from him. Like the others, it has no independent existence: 

"'So the part of his soul that was in me," asks Harry, 'has it gone?'

"'Oh, yes,' said Dumbledore. Yes, he destroyed it. Your soul is whole,
and completely your own, Harry" (70).

So the "small, maimed creature" isn't the soul bit. DD won't tell
Harry what it is, but he expects him to figure it out. 

Here's my interpretation (supply IMO as needed):

When Harry is sent in spirit (his mind and soul being so intertwined
as to be indistinguishable) to "King's Cross" (a near-death
experience, as Geoff says, in which he could have chosen to "go on" to
"the next great adventure" but didn't), Harry is glimpsing his own
future if he dies, and he sees that death is nothing to fear. 
Dumbledore is restored to wholeness; Harry himself is whole and free
of the soul bit. He can choose to remain and be with his loved ones,
but obviously that's the wrong choice. He has to go back. And if he
dies when he confronts Voldemort again, he knows now that death is
nothing to fear--not for him or even for the manipulative Dumbledore,
who has been restored to his benevolent self, his best self, even his
dead hand restored to health and wholeness. (Later, we see Lupin
healed of lycanthropy and Sirius free of the taint of Azkaban. Death,
Rowling is telling us, holds no terror for the good or the repentant.
Snape, I'm sure, will be healed of bitterness as a reward for his
courage and loyalty, his sins expiated by his final act of atonement.)

But Voldemort, too, is having a near-death experience. His troubled
followers have gathered around his fallen form, not sure what has
happened. His body lies on the ground, apparently still warm but
unresponsive. His soul, like Harry's, has passed temporarily into the
afterlife, where it lies in the form of a maimed fetus, helpless and
corrupt and untouchable but not truly dead because he still has one
remaining Horcrux. Voldemort, whom we glimpsed as a deformed fetus
(symbolizing, perhaps, the loss of humanity and wholeness caused by
the creation of the Horcruxes and the stunted condition of the soul
that has never loved) before Wormtail dropped him into the cauldron to
be restored to his old body. But this fetus is even more helpless. It
can't speak or lift a wand. It is flayed and tortured and beyond help.
Surely, this is the form that LV's soul will take if he dies unrepentant.

Harry knows from Hermione that the one way Voldemort can put himself
back together (or could have done before the Horcruxes were destroyed)
is to feel remorse, the pain of which could destroy him (103). When
Harry confronts Voldemort, he offers him that chance: "Think, and try
for some remorse, Riddle," he says. "It's your last chance. It's all
you've got. I've seen what you'll be otherwise" (741).

What Harry has seen is "a small, naked child, curled on the ground,
its skin raw and rough, flayed-looking," shuddering and struggling for
breath (706-7), beyond the help of Harry or Dumbledore or anyone
(708). Unless Voldemort suffers the excruciating pain of remorse for
his unspeakably evil deeds, his maimed and fragmented and undeveloped
soul, robbed of the destroyed soul bits, will spend eternity alone and
tortured and helpless, its fetal state showing its incompleteness,
beyond any hope of redemption because Voldemort dies without remorse.

Carol, who thinks this vision of Voldemort's personal hell is as
powerful and terrifying as anything in the book