Dumbledore's Plan/Deaths in DH/Catharsis

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 177519

lizzyben wrote:
> 
<snip> Harry sacrifices & "accepts" death, but yet escapes death. He
takes the Cloak, which allows the wearer to hide from death. <snip>

Carol responds:

I can't argue with your emotional response to DH, nor am I trying to
change it, which would be futile. But I do think you're taking certain
assumptions for granted--Dumbledore as "God," for example ("So Harry
is a Christ-figure who ignores a suffering child on his God's
orders") without giving any supporting evidence or considering the
evidence to the contrary. I agree that Harry is a Christ figure, but
that does not make him Christ (as I've explained in other posts). But
it would be strange indeed for the God figure, if there were one, to
weep and beg forgiveness of the Christ figure (DH Am. ed. 713) or to
state that the Christ figure is a "better man," as DD does (713). DD
admits his fallibility and weakness: I was such a fool, Harry. After
all those years I had learned nothing. I was unworthy to unite the
Deathly Hallows" (720)--"unworthy to be "the Master of Death." Very
unlike the Christian God, who is omniscient and omnipotent. Wise DD
may be, but he's human, capable of sin and error, and his plans can
and do go wrong.

Regarding the Invisibility Cloak, I think you may be confusing the
properties attributed to the cloak in the fairytale of the Three
Brothers with the properties of the Invisibility Cloak created by
Harry's ancestor Ignotus Peverell. (The Peverell brothers did not, as
DD points out, really meet Death on a bridge: "The story of [the wand,
stone and cloak] being Death's own Hallows seems to me the sort of
legend that might spring up around such creations," 714.) It would be,
as someone on this list pointed out, extremely difficult for Ignotus 
to marry and have children if he had hidden from death wearing an
Invisibility Cloak until he was ready to die. Nor can anyone really
hide from death in the HP books any more than they can in RL. As Harry
notes, the IC would not have protected James, its rightful owner (or
Lily if she were also under it), from Voldemort's Killing Curse (715).

Harry, of course, does not wear the cloak all the time, and even if he
did, it alone would not make him Master of Death. The Master of Death
is the rightful owner of all three Hallows, and Harry holds that role
only briefly, if at all, when he is wearing the Invisibility Cloak and
using the Resurrection Stone to bring back the shades of his loved
ones (who are still dead and cannot return to the world) only so that
he can join them. He is not using the Hallows to make himself
immortal, only to give himself the courage to sacrifice himself as his
mother did and join his beloved dead. He deliberately gives up the
Resurrection Stone instead of keeping it, and later deliberately
refuses to use the Elder Wand except to repair his own. IOW, Harry is
as mortal as anyone else at the end of the book and has relinquished
whatever claim he might have had to immortality, assuming that being
Master of Death would make that possible, rather than simply allowing
him to choose his time like the third brother in the fairy tale. 

Harry sacrifices himself and escapes death, true, but that escape has
nothing to do with the Invisibility Cloak, which he has tucked under
his robes with his (Draco's) wand so that he won't be tempted to use
it. He escapes death because he shares a drop of his mother's blood
with Voldemort, thanks to Voldie's hubris and folly, and he can't die
while Voldemort lives. Once Voldemort's Horcruxes are destroyed,
Voldemort becomes mortal, killed by his own deflected Killing Curse,
which relates to the Elder Wand (as far as I can determine), not to
the Invisibility Cloak or to the (deliberately relinquished)
Resurrection Stone. And once LV is dead, the blood protection that
Lily gave Harry, which operated against Voldemort (including, I think,
Voldemort's henchmen acting on his orders) but not against death in
other forms ceases to exist.

Harry, who has sacrificed himself, has the choice of actually dying
("going on") or returning to the world and finishing the task of
destroying Voldemort. It's not clear what would have happened had he
chosen to do so, but it is clear that even in "King's Cross," Harry is
not immortal, nor can he "hide from death," as you state.

Carol, now wondering whether Harry would have gone to King's Cross if
he had kept the stone