Who Needs Harry?

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 182322

In the story, Harry is the only person who can take down Voldemort,
because that's how the story is written. The Author endowed him with
the needed abilities and gave him lucky breaks, and decreed that
everything everyone else tried, failed. 

According to archetypal analysis (that's a New Age style of literary
criticism), the purpose of traditional folk tales and epics where the
hero is the only person who can possibly accomplish the assigned
heroic task, such as slaying the monster or stealing fire from heaven,
is to motivate ALL listeners to try their hardest and do their
damnedest to be heroic and do their duty and accomplish their destiny,
asserting that each person has a destiny that only they can do. 

Various assertions of what is this destiny or duty that only each
person can do for himerself (sorry, Carol!) include (but are not
limited to): having faith in Christ and living a humble and virtuous
life and resisting temptation; having compassion for all beings and
living a life of non-desire; expressing artistic creativity; enlisting
in the military at age 18 and winning a couple of medals before being
killed in battle before reaching 19; cleaning one's bedroom. 

For all that Rowling says she's just telling a story, I wouldn't be in
the least surprised if she had some conscious hope that the story
would encourage readers to try their hardest and do their damnedest to
be courageous and fight tyranny and human rights abuses and be kind to
people.

So it's a book. I believe we agree that the characters in books don't
have free will and their fate is already cast in concrete - a reader
may not yet know the ending when first reading the book, but it
already exists, already printed on later pages of the volume in one's
hand. And there is no such thing as a coincidence; every coincidence
that occurs in the story was directly created by the Author for a
purpose. And us readers can jump around in time as much as we like.
Every time we re-read OoP, it ends with Sirius dying, but then we
re-read PoA and are with him alive 'again'.

I am told that the Ancient Greeks believed that real life was much
like that description, that one's fate is inexorable and all one has
free will about is whether to go through it courageously and
graciously or cowardly and contemptibly. That's supposed to be the
reason they had stories of people trying to prevent prophecies from
coming true, that end up coming true just because of the attempt to
prevent them.

I've never understood why people who believe their fate is inexorable
bother to ask questions of  the oracles. Why bother asking "If I
attack the Persians, who will win?" when your fate is already set that
you will attack the Persians even if the oracle says you will lose?
Why bother sacrificing to the gods when it is already determined
whether or not they will strike you down for blasphemy? Why bother
studying for an exam if your score and the amount you know has already
been woven by the Fates? 

With that viewpoint, I *must* believe that we real life people have
free will, and our futures can be somewhat different depending on the
actions taken by each one and others, and there is such thing as
coincidence, and time travel creates a lot of paradoxes, and even the
best, most psychic and magical, oracle can tell only what is *likely*
to happen based on current trends. Otherwise even my prescription for
large doses of two different antidepressants wouldn't be enough to
make me ever get out of bed.