A mundane finality

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 185228

Unfortunately, I cannot find time to deal with these questions – or 
those on which I want to comment- en bloc so I shall limit myself 
to the occasional post. The first  one is that which follows. 

15. Tom Riddle falls "with a mundane finality." Such a fascinating
phrase. Was there anything mundane at all about this? Does JKR
imply that death strikes us all, no matter who are what? Why use 
such a phrase?

Because of the almost anti-climatic nature of his end: 
"And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand 
in his free hand as Voldemort fell backwards, arms splayed, the slit 
pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upwards. Tom Riddle hit the floor 
with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white 
hands empty, the snake-like face vacant and unknowing." (DH 
"The Flaw in the Plan" p.596 UK edition)

This is not the end of some hero, going down against overwhelming 
odds with a weapon in his hand to the last; this is not someone like 
Harry walking resolutely to an expected death intending by so doing 
to save others. This is the pointless, wasted end of someone who 
had tried to achieve greatness by power and oppression who slid down 
to an unloved end trying to maintain the glory and omnipotence which 
he thought he had possessed.

He was also stupid. Having made two direct attacks on Harry - as a 
baby and in the graveyard - and having seen his attempts repulsed in 
both cases, he allowed his overweening pride and belief in his potential 
immortality to blind him to the possibility that any further attacks 
would also fail. This was the stuff of Greek tragedy.

Reading this, I was also reminded that Voldemort's end carried echoes 
of so many dictators who fell to a "mundane", ignoble and useless end. 
Hitler, who had entered triumphantly into Warsaw and Paris shooting 
himself while effectively imprisoned in the Berlin bunker planning 
fantasy attacks to win back power with non-existent armies and 
persuading his followers to die with him so that he was not alone; 
Mussolini, no longer swaggering around Rome, strung up by his heels; 
Ceaucescu and his wife, who had held sway in luxury garnered at the 
expense of the grinding poverty of the Romanian people, falling to a 
firing squad in the snow on Christmas Day.

Of all these people, in fact and fiction, no one except brainwashed 
and fanatical disciples, mourned them. They left nothing for which 
they could be held up as examples to follow.

In terms of Voldemort's end I can only quote the bleak last lines of 
T.S.Eliot's well-known poem "The Hollow Men":

"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."