Resolutions/Ron's Cloak/Slytherins are Bad

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 183501

 
> Montavilla47:

> 
> As an example, let's take the House Elves.  Because she ends the
series  with her hero perfectly happy owning a slave, I tend to  think
JKR confused her "slavery is bad" message, and that the real message
ended up being, "slavery is only bad if you abuse your authority as a
slave owner."

Pippin:
But is that a real message? Nobody that I know of has actually felt
swayed to that belief by the books. No character in the novel wants
less freedom than he or she has. Even Voldemort's most willing
servants expect to win more freedom, not less. No reader that I know
of feels Kreacher's lot was happier than Dobby's, though Kreacher
lives and Dobby dies.

There's a famous painting called "The Treachery of Images" in which a
realistically painted tobacco pipe floats in space above the words (in
French) "This is not a pipe." On one level the words read as false.
But on another level they are true: you're not really looking at a
pipe, it's a painting of a pipe. The artist subverts the conventions
of genre in order to show how convention shapes what we see.

JKR does the same thing. Epic heroes are supposed to represent all the
values of their culture. Harry is instantaneously recognizable as an
epic hero, but he's doing something people in our culture aren't
supposed to do. It creates a cognitive dissonance, and reminds us that
Harry is not a real hero, he's a fictional one. But it also reminds us
that if he were a real hero, we would be unwise to expect  him to be
morally flawless. The image of a hero is not a hero. 

It's not the evil characters we're asked to forgive. It's the good
ones, for not measuring up to our ideal of goodness. And it's not the
crimes of the evil characters we must pardon, but ourselves for seeing
more evil in them than was there. 

Snape is right at the cusp of this: readers who expected him to be
good found that he wasn't as good as they hoped he would be. Readers
who wanted him to be evil discovered that he wasn't as evil as they
thought.

Who do you think Anne Frank was talking about when she said people
were basically good? Didn't she mean that people were only cooperating
with evil because they were frightened and misled,  inflamed against
the innocent or desperate to help the people they loved? How is that
different from Draco? Or Snape? 

Pippin