Harry's dreams in GoF

[krista7]

No: HPFGUIDX 165617

Carol writes:
> I'm re-re-re-re-reading GoF, and I'm curious about what other posters
> think of the point of view in the two dream chapters....
> 
> But in GoF, the first dream is from the pov of an unknown Muggle,
> Frank Bryce...>
> In the second dream, Harry is riding on the back of the eagle owl that
> Fake!Moody has sent to inform Voldemort that he's murdered his father,
> Mr. Crouch....
> From a plot standpoint, these two dreams work beautifully, giving
> Harry and the reader pieces of information that will be useful later...
But in terms
> of narrative strategy, they make no sense. ...
> Is JKR cheating just to provide information that Harry couldn't
> otherwise know, or is there a logical explanation for Harry to see
> from a point of view other than Voldemort's in his Voldie dreams?


I think the dream sequences have specific jobs to carry out. They convey useful 
information, as Carol mentioned. They also serve to prepare the reader for
the two alterating elements in Order of the Phoenix, Harry's dream-link
with Voldemort, and the ways in which Harry's efforts to seek help from
the adults around him fail misserably. Here, for example, after each dream,
Harry tries to get an adult to help him: He writes Sirius after the first dream,
and goes to Dumbledore after the second. (This allows him to interrupt Dumbledore
in his office and to peek in the pensieve, too.) Dumbledore shows signs of 
the chief problems in OotP by acknowledging Harry's information but not sharing
fully his own knowledge of it--he just says it means Voldie is growing stronger,
but not what to do about these dreams. 

The dreams work in the book in other ways than to set the grounds for OotP: 
they very effectively convey the horror of Voldemort's return by having the
reader slowly catch glimpses of him--glimpses in which it is made clear he 
is unspeakably evil and monstrous--before the reveal at the end of "Goblet."
When he shows up fully in the graveyard in GoF, and when
Harry begins to see through Voldie's eyes in OotP, we therefore don't identify with 
him or humanize him. We haven't just written him off
as a less stylish Luicius, for example. Even before Voldemort walks onto the HP stage as
a full-bodied adult, we are therefore primed to be terrified of him, thanks to seeing
bits of him in these dreams. 

In terms of why we see a third person point of view within the context of the actual
stories, not JKR's literary needs, I'd suggest that the sense in both dreams is of a person 
(Harry) being drawn to Voldemort unknowingly.  According to Dumbledore in OotP, 
Harry's sleeping mind was trying to forge a link between the two, a link Voldie would
want to exploit. Maybe, when Harry slept, his mind was already beginning this process
and trying to "find" Voldemort? And because Harry is good, and perhaps because he was
likely to identify with an old muggle, or an owl, rather than Wormtail or Voldie, he was 
initially able to see through/alongside these "innocent" perspectives, rather than 
being able to instantly comprehend V's evil enough to enter his brain? 

Krista