Did Harry Notice?

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 182876


> Jack-A-Roe:
<snip>
> 
> The viewpoint is Voldemorts. So we are going to get his perspective
on things and we can't completely trust it anymore than we can 
believe the Harry filter or Snape's cherry picked memories. They are 
> all true to that person but probably not the entire truth. (Which I 
> think is what Steve has mentioned)

Carol responds:

Actually, we know that the Pensieve memories are accurate. The only
perspective that distorts them at all is not snape's but Harry's. (To
be sure, Snape has chosen the memories that suit his purpose, but
there's no point in delaying Harry by giving him irrelevant ones.)
Snape's memories, unlike this one of Voldemort's are objective records
in which we see him from the outside. Our only indication of his
thoughts and feelings is his words, actions, and facial expressions.
Dumbledore's memories--and Hokey's and Morfin's and Bob Ogden's--are
all exactly as they happened, seen from the outside. The only example
we have of an altered Pensieve memory is Slughorn's, and the
alterations are obvious to anyone except Harry, who wonders what the
fog was.

Voldemort's memory is different from the Pensieve memories in being
from his own perspective, but it's so detailed that I think it is also
intended to be accurate. (For one thing, it's the only description we
get of the events at Godric's Hollow. The subjective element comes in
when we get his decision not to kill the little boy he scares (his
thoughts at the moment that it happened, not his interpretation after
the fact), hi view of James as foolish and trusting (the reader is
free to agree or disagree), and so forth. But as to the facts of the
memory--James playing with Harry, James leaving his wand on the couch
and calling out to Lily in words that we've already heard in Harry's
Boggart!Demento memory in PoA, Voldemort killing the wandless James
and hearing Lily barricade the door to Harry's room, Voldemort blowing
aside the obstacles, Lily begging him not to kill Harry and Voldemort
telling him to stand aside (again using words we've heard before),
voldemort killing Lily and trying to kill the now frightened
Baby!Harry, Voldemort in agony, not knowing what had happened,
thinking that he'd killed "the boy" and yet hearing him scream and
needing to go far away--I see no reason to question those events any
more than we question what Harry sees and hears, however much we may
sometimes question his interpretation of what he sees and hears. As
Mrs. Figg says about the Dementors in Little Whinging, "And that's
what happened." We know at last, admittedly from LV's perspective
rather than that of the dead Potters or Baby!Harry, what happened. But
I see nothing to question in terms of the words spoken or the actions
taken by anyone involved. the one difference between this memory and
the Pensieve memories is that we're inside Voldemort's mind. But we've
already been there countless times, from OoP onward. (Oddly, the first
GoF dream is presented from Frank Bryce's perspective and the eagle
owl dream from Harry's; once LV has regained his body, the dreams and
visions are always from his perspective--or the snake's when LV is
possessing her--and he often looks down and sees LV's long-fingered
white hands as if they were his own and feels that *he* is speaking in
that high, cold voice.

Even in DH, the scenes that are happening as Harry experiences them
feel to Harry as if he's Voldemort: "H . . . saw the whiteness of his
own long-fingered hand against the door. He knocked. He felt a
mounting excitement. . . . His long-fingered hand had drawn his wand.
. . . He raised the wend. . . ." (232-33). It's as if Harry himself
had killed the German mother. And later, with Gregorovitch, "Harry's
voice was high, clear, and cold, his wand held in front of him by a
long-fingered white hand" (279). In these visions, in which he is so
fused with Voldemort that he can't tell his own voice and hand and
emotions from Voldemort's, he never sees his own face unless it's in a
mirror, just as we can't see our own faces in real life. (Most
interestingly, to me, Harry actually experiences Legilimency as
Voldemort experiences it, entering *Gregorovitch's* mind as if it were
a Pensieve in pursuit of the Elder Wand.

The difference between these moments and Voldemort's relived
experience at Godric's Hollow lies chiefly in that Harry is actually
more Voldemort than himself. It begins, not with the memory but with
the present, with Harry's scar seeming to burst open as he twists in
midair and then he *is* Voldemort, clutching the windowsill with those
long white hands and watching "the bald man and the little woman twist
and vanish"--Polyjuiced Harry and Hermione Disapparating. And then the
memory begins, not with his entering Godric's Hollow confident that
he's about to destroy "the one with the power to defeat the Dark Lord"
but with the agony of being ripped from his body. And here we see
either Harry or Voldemort (I think Harry) wondering, "But if he had no
body, why did his head hurt so badly; if he was dead, how could he
feel so unbearably, didn't pain cease with death, didn't it go . . .
." (342, ellipses in original).

And then we slip (in italicized print) into what is clearly
Voldemort's memory, experienced by Harry without any awareness of his
real self at all, and the narration is different from what we've seen
before, very much Voldemort's view of himself and the world around him
as it was then, and not just the white hands and high voice and
emotions but every sensory detail as it appeared to Voldemort at the
time, even his reaction to Muggle-style Halloween and a child's
reaction to his costume. He's tempted to kill the child. "Beneath the
robe he fingered the handle of his wand." Does Harry feel as if he,
too, is fingering the wand? I think he does. Does he, too, feel
tempted to kill the child and decide, as if of his own free will but
really reexperiencing what Voldemort once thought and felt, not to
kill the child? I think he does. 

We even get his nearly silent footsteps and his view through the
window; he sees clearly what's happening because the Fidelius Charm
has been broken (not by the Potters's deaths as Harry had thought but
by Peter's breach of faith--I wonder if Harry understands at that
point but probably not because he's Voldemort and Voldemort takes the
cause of the broken charm for granted), but he can't hear the words
that the Potters are speaking. We get descriptions of the Potters as
seen by a stranger who nevertheless knows who they are, the tall
black-haired man with glasses and the woman with long dark-red hair.
The gate creaks and then we get a detail that resembles the earlier
visions of a present shared by Harry and Voldemort as Harry
experiences Voldemort's reality, the white hand pulling out the wand
and pointing it, but we also get his thoughts: "It was easy, too easy.
he had not even picked up his wand" (Too easy? should that have been a
hint to Voldemort?). He casts the Killing Curse and green light fills
the room, showing seemingly insignificant details that vividly
recreate the moment as it was lived--the light on the pram pushed
against the wall the banisters "glar[ing] like lightning rods." We get
the details of Lily's death, the complete dialogue, his motivation for
killing her after all ("it seemed prudent to kill them all"), his
pointing the wand into Harry's face, wanting to see it happen, the
curse, and then the return to the thought and feeling that triggered
the memory, Voldemort breakinga dn becoming "nothing but pain and
terror." 

At that point, Harry is starting to come to, starting to realize that
he is not Voldemort and then we have the confusion, which seems to be
Voldemort's, over having killed the boy and yet being the boy but
could be shared by Harry, Harry's "no," Voldemort's return to the
present, seeing the photograph and pulling himself jubilantly into the
present, at which point Harry realizes that he dropped the photograph
and wakes up: He becomes "Harry, not Voldemort." (343-45)

The detail in the memory is, IMO, very telling. It's much more real
and accurate than the usual subjectively and partially recalled Muggle
memory (or Harry's own muddled memories, for that matter). It's almost
as if Voldemort, the great and terrible Legilimens, is using
Legilimency on himself for once, wandering in his own perfectly
recalled memory, but from his own subjective point of view, so that
his thoughts and emotions (to the extent that he feels emotions) and
pain are recalled exactly as they were along with the physical details
of a child in a costume, Hallwoeen decorations, and the green light of
the AK lighting up the pram and the banister.

Subjective? Yes, to a point. Inaccurate? I don't think so.


> Jack-A-Roe:
> I don't understand why James needed redeeming. We saw him act like
and were told that he acted like a teenage boy when he was a young
teenage boy. <snip>

Carol responds:
Maybe for you he doesn't. But some of us wanted to see something of
James beyond the arrogant bullying toerag, to use Lily's name for him.
We wanted to see the brave and powerful James that we'd been led to
expect from the moment that Hagrid and McGonagall mourned him and Lily
in SS/PS. We saw a talented boy who became an Animagus and helped to
create the Marauder's Map, we (barely) glimpsed the young father
playing with his baby son, but we never saw the Order member doing
anything important to help save the WW, never saw him putting up the
courageous fight that Voldemort claimed he had done, never saw him
casting so much as a Stupefy in his family's defense. Instead, he
carelessly tosses his wand on the sofa, trusting to the Fidelius Charm
and Peter Pettigrew. It's sad, or it would be if I liked James, but it
isn't tragic or heroic. And, for me and readers like me, it doesn't
take away the bad taste left by SWM. The arrogant teenage bully, who
torments Severus Snape *after* rescuing him from the werewolf,
transforms offstage into the nice but overly trusting young father.
And Hero!James is reduced to a vain (in the sense of futile) boast
"I'll hold him off!" and the advice to Lily to take Harry and run.
Just where she's supposed to run with no wand and no Invisibility
Cloak, I don't know. She, too, has trusted to the Fidelius Charm and
Peter. At least, thanks to Snape, she has a chance to live, giving her
sacrifice meaning. James's death is just a death, over as quickly as
Cedric Diggory's when Fetal!mort tells Wormtail to "Kill the spare!"

Maybe you don't find it disappointing. I wanted James to really be a
hero, to really be all that Hagrid and Sirius and Lupin painted him as
being. All I see is a clever boy who liked risks, was good at
Quidditch, had an extremely high opinion of himself, genuinely liked
Sirius because they were so much alike, tolerated Wormtail because he
fawned on him, thought that Remus Lupin was "cool" solely because he
was a werewolf, and hexed people who annoyed him, was always in
detention, and attacked Severus Snape (whom he viewed as an instant
enemy simply because Severus wanted to be sorted into slytherin) two
on one with Sirius with no provocation. In short, he gives Percy
competetion in the Big Head Boy department and the Twins competition
in the troublemaker department and Sirius Black competition in the
risk-taking department (though I think that Sirius wins that one) and
Dudley and Draco competition in the bullying department.

Yes, he's a kid, but he's not a kid that I find admirable. I was
hoping to find a (very young) man to take his place and win my
affection as the "arrogant little berk" did not. And, unfortunately
for my hopes and expectations, that brave young man who courageously
fought Voldemort to give his wife time did not materialize.

I can't convince you to see him as I see him, but, as LV says in GoF,
"I confess myself--disappointed."

In James only, BTW. Otherwise, I thought that the Godric's Hollow
flashback, even with the confusion of viewpoints and of past and
present near the end, was brilliantly written and imagined, down to
the smallest detail.

Carol, wondering whether James's blind trust in the fawning but
faithless Wormtail is intended as a contrast to Dumbledore's trust in
Snape, which had a firm foundation in more than Snape's love of Lily