some replies which are direct but off topic

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186228

Sartoris22 wrote:
> 
> All the points you make are good ones, and I'll try to respond to a few of them.

Carol responds:
Thanks.

Sartoris 22: 
> I think the narrator is very sympathetic toward many characters, including Lupin, the Weasley family, Hermione, and Hagrid. Mostly, we get our clues about how to feel about characters from the narrator, which is why Rowling herself expressed surprize that so many fans actually "liked" Draco Malfoy, who is written as, at least in the early books, a fairly unpleasant character.

Carol responds:
Although the narrator isn't Harry, he or she writes from Harry's point of view, so the sympathetically portrayed characters are the ones that Harry likes or at least feels sorry for. It's interesting in some cases to see that viewpoint change. Some examples that come to mind are Tom Riddle and the Half-blood Prince, both originally viewed as helpful and good but then viewed as evil when their identity is revealed. That judgement is reversed again in the Prince's (Snape's case). The opposite is true of Grawp, who's originally depicted as a kind of monster because that's how Harry sees him and later as a gentle giant because Harry's perspective has changed. Of course, in some cases (Kreacher, for example, and possibly Draco, who is no longer "Malfoy" in DH), the narrator's depiction changes because the character himself changes, but most of the time, the depiction changes because Harry sees the character differently. By the end of the last book, Harry's perspective and the narrator's have (IMO) been cleansed or clarified, merging with JKR's own as the full truth (or what JKR considers the full truth) about them is revealed to Harry and the reader simultaneously.

Sartoris22: 
> As for distinguishing between Rowling and the narrator, it goes without saying that Rowling creates the narrator, but the narrator is endowed only with the knowledge the writer gives her. The narrator doesn't necessarily know what the writer knows. She's an entity unto herself. <snip> Rowling has extensive knowledge of British and world history, yet her narrator rarely, if ever employs that knowledge, which is why I separate Rowling from the narrator, even though the narrator is her invention. Years ago, I read Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, and I vaguely remember him discussing this distinction.

Carol responds:
Yes, I read "The Rhetoric of Fiction," too, and no doubt it helped to shape my perspective. I need to reread the book to see how much I've unconsciously absorbed. (I suspect that Henry James's remarks on "narrative consciousness" also made me aware of the author/narrator distinction in works with a third-person narrator; it's self-evident that a first-person narrator is a fictional character from the author. No one, I hope, would mistake Moll Flanders for Daniel Defoe or Huckleberry Finn for Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens. But the distinction between a limited omniscient narrator and the author who created that narrator is less self-evident.) At any rate, I agree with you that the distinction is important and it rests primarily on the limitations of the narrator's knowledge. Clearly, JKR's narrator doesn't know what JKR is concealing from the reader and consequently the narrator is bound to be unreliable whenever JKR as author wants to mislead the reader.

Sartoris22: 
> I don't think it's unusual for a female writer to be able to describe the feelings of boys because women, for the most part, raise boys in Western society, and this information about boys is shared with other women. Besides, women tend to be more observant of human behavior. It isn't that unusual for women writers to write convincingly about men; George Eliot and Ayn Rand come readily to mind. It is more unusual for a male writer to write effectively about women, in my opinion. ,snip>

Carol:
I agree. I'm going to step onto thin ice here and say that I think it's because women tend to see men and women as equally human and to focus on their shared characteristics, whereas men tend to think of women as fitting certain roles in relation to men--mother, sister, lover, wife, daughter, teacher, nurse--rather than as individual human beings with distinctive needs and abilities and personalities. (The English poet Robert Southey once said that all women were alike in everything except looks because their minds and education were inferior to a man's, so it didn't matter who a man married as long as she was mild and beautiful. I can't remember the exact quotation, so I may be a bit off in my paraphrase, but his view is an extreme version of the idea that the only qualities that matter in a woman are youth and beauty and that a woman's place is in the home.)

Sartoris22:
> Overall, I think that the narrator seems more female than male, and do think she is sympathetic toward many characters besides Harry.

Carol:
I'm still not sure that the narrator is female. Certainly, the narrative voice in the chapters that abandon Harry's point of view seems neutral in all respects, including sex ("gender") or sexuality, which are, of course, irrelevant to those scenes. I've already indicated that the narrator is *generally* sympathetic toward the same characters that Harry is simply because in those chapters, he or she is writing from Harry's point of view.

Carol,back from Flagstaff, where the daffodils were bravely struggling to raise their heads above the falling snow