Book 7 Epilogue

[gary_braithwaite]

No: HPFGUIDX 177096

> gypsy.swpa:
> Did anyone else hate the ending of book 7?

I try not to get too "bent out of shape" by the epilogue if that is
what you are referring to.  Please remember that the main text of DH
closes with an exhausted, now victorious Harry thinking of a sandwich
to eat and his bed in Gryffindor tower (DH, ch. 36, Amer. page 749).
I assume that his next two acts, outside of walking upstairs, are
eating and sleeping -- a well deserved, long rest.

So I am assuming that the epilogue is in fact a seventeen year-old's
not very realistic, warm, romantic dream about his projected future.
The haziness of the scene described (foggy, hazy) would match a
dream.  In addition, it is an extremely limited POV involving himself, Ginny, Ron and Hermione with their children going to Hogwarts (the most wonderful event of his own young life to date which would also support a dream interruption.  He still has problems with Malfoy -- he has given him a boy named Scorpius -- sorry ... that is part of a real closure, a separate peace?

In addition to the epilogue itself, those us who have trouble with
this depiction of the future wonder if Rowlings herself believes this
for Harry -- hero of the second battle of Hogwarts and the conqueror
of LV -- an adoring WW awaits him when he wakes up from this sleep.
She recently had the walls around her castle home extended skyward to
ward off intruders, probably from the adoring public as well as the
strange and the weird ones that litter our real world.  Would Harry
actually be given his peace, his desired normal life in the
aftermath?  I think not...

But like her earlier counterpart and my favorite author, Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, I suspect she is both tired of HP and needs to move on
(plus she was committed to the seven book cycle - a strategic mistake
that caused the ever-growing length of the last 3 works in the
cannon.)  My view (fantasy?) is that she has written in the epilogue
to DH the equivalent of Doyle killing Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls.  Doyle eventually came to reject that ending mostly due to public pressure and so Holmes "returned" although diffent, less Holmesian in someways -- perhaps due to his victory over Moriarty, he lost his worthy adversary and thus his edge.

So never fear, as it has beeen written -- the past is prologue,
not "epilogue".  There may be more fuel for the fire so those
disappointed in the romantic resolutions.

Gary B.