Harry as Frodo or not?

[zeldaricdeau]

No: HPFGUIDX 176685

> > Alla: 

> > And of course the main similarity to me is that neither Harry nor 
Sam 
> > fail AND both of them get the ending of the happy family with 
kids 
> > and all that. I mean of course Frodo's kindness makes it that in 
his 
> > falling he wins, etc, but Sam IMO literally never fails, does not 
> > succumb to ring, etc.
 
> Magpie:

> I would agree that Harry and Frodo have little in common, though I 
> don't see much in common between Harry and Sam either. I have 
trouble 
> with the whole "Sam never fails" idea, because while it's certainly 
> true that he never fails, Sam *would* have failed if he carried the 
> ring as well, because the task itself was impossible. It's not like 
> killing Voldemort where you just have to do the right thing, it's 
that 
> you *can't* do it unless you are literally God, which Sam was not. 
I 
> think the scene in the Tower where Sam doesn't initially want to 
give 
> the ring back because he wants to "spare Frodo the burden" 
indicates 
> that. Failing was Frodo's mission all along.

zeldaricdeau:

I'd like to second Magpie's assertion that Sam never fails because he 
is never given the opportunity to fail like Frodo is. Sam, like 
Frodo, *would* have succumb to the Ring had he worn it as long as 
Frodo had. His ambitions with it would have been in direct proportion 
to his ambitions without it which may have been less than Frodo's 
ambitions but would still have been Ring-induced and therefore 
corrupted. Also, Frodo may fail the impossible task but he 
accomplishes the human and Christian one that ends up saving the day 
in the end: he pities Gollum. I'd also like to state that Sam DOES 
fail in this: he never pities Gollum as Frodo does. 

It's a combination of pity, chance, and self-sacrifice that brings 
the Ring to its end, but I think the book's moral structure hinges on 
the pity. Pity saves the world in Tolkien's universe for had Frodo 
not pitied Gollum, Gollum would not have been there to fall in his 
ecstasy with the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Had Bilbo not 
pitied Gollum, Gollum would never have lived to set the events of 
LotR in motion. It's one of the reasons I think the Return of the 
King in the medium-that-must-not-be-named fails ultimately: it 
substitutes gullibility for pity.

To bring this back around to the topic of the list :-) I honestly 
think Tolkien was working in a far more carefully constructed moral 
universe than Rowling, who I think contradicts herself morally far 
too often, and this makes comparisons difficult. I don't think 
there's any direct reflection of Frodo or Sam in Harry, although 
there may be some more abstract correlations between LotR and HP. 
Harry sacrifices himself and feels pity like Frodo, and he ends up 
with the happy "all is well" family that Sam does, but I think the 
similarities stop here.

As for those more general or thematic correlations:

Harry, having felt pity, offers Riddle a chance at redemption by 
telling him to try for some remorse. If this somehow throws Voldemort 
off-balance in that moment such that he misjudges and brings about 
his own downfall then I'd say there's a LotR/HP correlation there and 
maybe even a Frodo/Harry one. But that confrontation seems muddied in 
terms of moral message (more on this below) so I feel like I have to 
force a correlation there. 

Perhaps more viable is the fact that Voldemort, like Sauron, fails to 
protect his ambitions because he can no longer understand the inner 
workings of people. Sauron couldn't conceive of anyone wanting to 
destroy his Ring (that is, refusing power) much less walking into 
certain death to do so (self-sacrifice). It's ludicrous to Voldemort 
that Snape, his "right hand man," could have possibly been a traitor 
to him for all these years at the cost of his life and happiness for 
LOVE of all things. Likewise, it's ludicrous that Dumbledore would 
choose to DIE at a certain time to further the fight. He also can't 
envision a Neville Longbottom who would continue to fight in the face 
of such utter defeat and thus kills Nagini. But does this lack of 
understanding account for his demise? I think there's a 
stronger "yes" possible here, but I'm not totally sold on it.

Back to the last confrontation. Harry proclaims many things to 
Voldemort, offers him pity, and taunts him. I've still not settled on 
a good reason for why he does everything he does here. The fact that 
Voldemort is utterly defeated because of an accidental change in 
allegiance of a wand makes his defeat pathetic in a sense, but the 
visual imagery is grand to the extreme (the sun rising in the 
enchanted ceiling). Certainly he was diminished and made mortal again 
by an act of self-sacrificial love among other things, but his death 
is the result of chance almost exclusively. One might argue that 
Harry's bravery was a key as well since Harry didn't know whether the 
wand would recognize the allegiance change or not, but this seems 
shaky to me as a pointer towards a moral message.

All of this extraordinarily confusing post is to say that without a 
clearer sense of the moral message in HP I have a hard time seeing 
Frodo/Sam reflected in Harry. 

zeldaricdeau (who thinks the most obvious and rather annoying Tolkien 
reference was the whole wearing the locket/carrying the Ring makes 
you bad bit: why on Earth did they have to WEAR it anyway?)