Slytherins come back WAS: Re: My Most Annoying Character

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 180271

Magpie wrote:
> Harry's not expressing any opinion in this sentence (though if 
you're referring to that one sentence I don't see why Harry's opinion
wouldn't be that it looked like shopkeepers, Charlie, Slughorn and
friends/family of non-Slytherin students were there, period). 

Carol responds:
Right. Harry is not the narrator, and the third-person-limited
narrator has been shown to be unreliable on certain occasions because
Harry, whose viewpoint the narrator is usually presenting, is not
always observant or correctly informed or unbiased. So what the
narrator reports is what Harry sees or thinks he sees or Harry's
reaction to or interpretation of what he sees (or hears or feels). And
his interpretation, as I have shown in some half a dozen posts at
least, is not always reliable, starting with Snape causing or
appearing to cause the pain in Harry's scar. And in this instance, we
have Harry's fleeting impression of what SEEMS to be happening as he
rushes to find Voldemort. (Have you ever tried to identify faces in a
rushing, pajama-clad crowd?) He spots Charlie and Slughorn, both
well-known to him and neither of them inconspicuous, at the head of a
crowd that SEEMS to be composed of Hogsmeade merchants and parents
(whether students are included is unclear), but Harry doesn't have
either the time to find out or the interest in doing so. The scene
shifts quickly to the House-Elves, only one of whom is identified. Is
Winky there? We don't know--unless we count JKR's off-page statement
that she was there as canon. Her not being named certainly does not
preclude her being there, just as Rosmerta's not being named doesn't
mean she wasn't among the citizens of Hogsmeade. (Is she still under
the Imperius Curse? We aren't told, so we have to decide for ourselves
whether she was likely to be there or not.)

Magpie:
The narrator is telling us, using the usual limited pov, what's going
on. And all I'm saying is that when I read the scene I read the way I
always do, which is to read the words that are there. <snip>

Carol:

Except that you are conveniently overlooking certain words that
conflict with your interpretation: "seemed" and "what looked like."
Obviously, "seemed" and "what looked like" describe what Harry thought
he saw, not what he really saw. Again, he didn't know most of the
citizens of Hogsmeade or most of the parents of the Hogwarts students.
He's guessing at the identity of the people in the crowd, and the
narrator is reporting that guess, not as fact but as what SEEMED to
Harry to be happening.

Magpie:
> Honestly, who reads like that? Who reads a sentence telling us 
> that "the next group to try out for the team were Hufflepuffs" and 
> thinks that's telling us anything but that the next group of people 
> were Hufflepuffs because Harry doesn't know everybody, or might be 
> mistaken, or is obviously wrong because this is the Gryffindor try-
> out? 
> 
Carol:
No one reads like that, but the sentences aren't comparable. The
narrator doesn't say, "The next group *seemed* to be Hufflepuffs" or
"The next group was composed of *what looked like* all the first years
at Hogwarts." We just get straightforward information that they're
Hufflepuffs or first-years (Harry suddenly being more aware of who's
who at Hogwarts than he usually is). 

But even straightforward sentences sometimes turn out to be unreliable
(see my "Harry knew" sentences in a previous post, or the infamous
"Snape was going to Crucio him into insanity"). You have to consider
context. How much is Harry likely to know or understand about what
he's seeing? How likely is he to interpret it correctly? In this
instance, his guess may be close, but it's probably not right on the
money. (How could he possibly identify every person in that crowd? He
couldn't.)

> Magpie:
> Harry already knows "Slytherin house played its part" regardless. 
> The book showed Slytherin playing its part without any mention of 
> actual students returning to fight here. The line makes sense 
> without those students--it has to, because the book never actually 
> mentioned the Slytherins returning and the line was still there. 
> Harry refers to one of those other things when he tells his son he 
> doesn't care what house he's Sorted into (wonder why his son is 
> worried?)--which I think any decent father would have said no matter 
> what and is of course followed by the assurance that if you don't 
> want to be in Slytherin you won't be there. No real change from Book 
> I that I can see. 
> 
Carol:
Wait. You're allowed to interpret Phineas Nigellus's sentence on
Slytherin's playing its part, but we're not allowed to interpret the
not always reliable narrator's reporting of vague description of what
Harry thinks he sees? Somehow, that doesn't seem like fair play to me.

Magpie:
> Which still does not change that sentence in canon to say that 
> Slughorn came back leading a charge of Slytherin students. 

Carol:
Nor does it exclude the possibility that the crowd that *seemed* to be
composed of parents and citizens that he didn't know from including
students, especially the students whose parents were being led. And it
remains more probable that the parents would be those of Slughorn's
own students, who were allowed to go home and get them, than those of
the students who remained at Hogwarts and had no opportunity to
contact their parents.

Have you ever noticed, BTW, that Harry's interpretations are often
wrong (for example, in his interpretation of the overheard
conversation between Draco and Snape), but the narrator never
specifies that Harry was wrong. We just figure it out for ourselves in
light of later information.

Carol, wishing she had time to look up all the instances of "seemed"
or "what looked like" or "appeared to be" in the books to see how many
are accurate