Epilogue (was Re: Ron and Parseltongue)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 183498

Geoff wrote:
> I think the whole point is that the perfect book cannot exist.
> 
> Why?
> 
> Because the concept of perfection is different to everyone on this
list. <snip> I would have felt very let down and even betrayed if JKR
had allowed Harry to be killed. And yet, there were many for whom the
boot was on the other foot and were in their turn disappointed.
> 
> For every person who thought that DH was a cop out and full of plot
holes, there was one who was reasonably well satisfied by the
outcomes.  Personally, I belonged to the latter group - except for the
epilogue. 
<snip>

Carol responds:

I agree that JKR could not possibly have met the expectations or
fulfilled the hopes of every reader. In fact, I'd wager that the
majority of readers were surprised by many aspects of the book and
more than half were disappointed in some way. (Yes, we knew that
characters, a lot more than the two mistakenly predicted by reporters
who misread her comment about two *unplanned* deaths, but why our
favorite character?) Themes and subplots that we thought were
important were left unresolved, etc., or characters whose development
we hoped for seemed to regress. (I'm generalizing, and I'm sure that I
haven't mentioned all the ways in which various readers were
disappointed.)

However, a book or series *can* be judged by more objective criteria,
one of which is consistency. The HP books, and DH in particular,
contain many inconsistencies, ranging from the relatively minor (such
as the number of students at Hogwarts) to the thematically important
(the treatment of Unforgiveable Curses). Puzzles like the presence of
Lily's letter to Sirius in the Black family home are left for the
reader to figure out--JKR herself seems not even to notice the
problem. Nor does she realize that the date of the letter, just after
Harry's first birthday, conflicts with the statement in GoF that
Wormtail was made SK only a week before the Potters' deaths. JKR seems
not even to check her own fictional facts.

There also minor stylistic flaws, such as dangling modifiers and even
an occasional grammatical error ("myself" for "me") that a copyeditor
should have caught and corrected, but I doubt that most readers notice
such things.

At any rate, not all the flaws in DH are in the eyes of the beholder.
Some are failures to uphold the standards of correctness and
completeness and consistency that both readers and editors have a
right to expect.

OTOH, JKR had every right as an author to kill off characters in the
way she saw fit and to bring in the Deathly Hallows, in particular the
Elder Wand, just as we as readers have every right to wish that we
hadn't. What we can't do, however, is to judge such authorial
decisions as flaws in the books comparable to the various Flints and
inconsistencies, which *are* errors and ought, if possible, to be
corrected in any revised edition (or at least acknowledged by JKR, who
seems unwilling to admit that she's ever made a mistake and instead
rationalizes everything from Flint's year in school to Harry's
inability to see Thestrals at the end of GoF).

Carol, who thinks that to some extent both the Hallows and the
Horcruxes are McGuffins