Dumbledore's Plan/Deaths in DH/Catharsis

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 177476

Lizzyben:
> 
> I didn't feel a similar emotional catharsis in DH. The reader is wrung
> through the emotional wringer as character after character is killed
> off - but it is mentioned almost in passing, and those characters
> aren't honored. After the battle, we don't get to see how the Weasleys
> or Harry or Hermione cope with their loss, how they mourn the people
> they care about, or how they've changed. Instead, there's a tacked-on
> saccharine Yay! Happy! ending 20+ years later. Lame. That's not
> catharsis. 

Pippin:
The catharsis chapter for me was King's Cross. The death that's supposed
to affect us, or that deeply affected me at least, was the death of hope
for Voldemort's soul. That was  the overwhelming tragedy that Jo made
me feel -- not the loss of so many lives, however deeply missed, but 
the waste of  that one  soul.  
 
My understanding, and of course I don't know if this is what Jo had
in mind, is that Voldemort's soul, being sovereign, can not be rescued 
from the prison he  created of it. He, like the Albania in which he once 
took refuge, is a closed-border state. For me that's heart-breaking. 


Harry and Dumbledore can do nothing more, not even sympathize. 
There is no connection possible because he's rejected the ability to feel 
anything but hate and anger, emotions of which Harry and Dumbledore,
in their more perfect state, are no longer capable.

I think it would be easy to mistake transcendence for coldness.
Harry was so devastated by the death of Cedric, yet each 
subsequent death seems to affect him less. But it isn't, IMO, that 
Jo has forgotten to make him care about losing people, it's that 
to him they're not really lost, or that he grows to understand
Luna's serene confidence that nothing can truly be taken from 
her. 

The quotation in the front of the book explains it better:
"This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to
die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever
present, because immortal."

If you read the book as fairy tales are meant to be read, never
finishing without starting again ( "Another story, sister! Another 
story!") you will encounter that quote as a coda to the epilogue,
along with the poem from Aeschylus which seems to lament
Snape's death. 

Pippin
"And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could
*never stop reading*" -- CoS