Lack of re-examination (was:Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186498


> Betsy Hp:
> Honestly, that the books don't obligate readers to go back and re-examine things like that is a reason I'm so squirmy about them.  

Pippin:

The books  force you to re-read in order to understand the plot twists. 

If you're at all into the books,  even vaguely curious, you're going to go back to see if you should have spotted any clues that Fake!Moody was a DE -- and whoa! there he is, torturing people. Do we really need Harry to say, wow, I should have known then? If he did, we wouldn't have to go back and look for the clues, and that wouldn't be nearly so much fun.

DH, which requires a lot of re-thinking, has a plot so twisty that people are still arguing about it. 

If you're at all curious about why Harry doesn't want to use the Elder Wand, even though his friends think he should, then you have to ask yourself whether he thinks he should trust himself with its power, and why or why not. It doesn't work if you don't care about Harry, but if you don't care about Harry, you're not likely to take him as a role model, good or bad. 

The point of right vs easy is that moral awareness can take  effort even from people who are instinctively generous and protective. Just because Harry's instincts are admirable most of the time doesn't mean that they're admirable all the time. IMO, JKR wants to make us realize that it's the same for us as readers. Usually we know right away when our heroes are doing the right thing and when they're not. But not always. 

IMO, JKR's goal isn't to make us want to be moral. She thinks (as a liberal must) that most of us want to be moral already. She wants to show us that moral awareness can be tougher than we think. Since she doesn't want to preach, she leaves it up to us to decide whether it's worth the effort. 

Harry does rethink things occasionally, enough to show us that re-thinking is something people do. But if he did it all the time, then the author would be showing us  that  people will always find out when they've done wrong. But will they? Maybe, if they live long enough. But did Sirius ever realize that he'd mistreated Kreacher? Probably not. It took him almost twenty years to get as far as not being proud of how he'd treated Snape. 

The WW may take centuries to work out that it was wrong to enslave the Elves, just as our culture took centuries to work out that it was wrong to enslave other humans.

A liberal  has to believe that most people mean well, because if they don't, then majority rule is a non-starter. But history tells us the majority  can participate in slavery, torture and  extermination. So it seems that meaning well is not enough.
 
 Snape made it very plain with his disgusting pictures in HBP.
This is what you're fighting, he says  -- the things that enslave and torture and kill. And I was shocked to re-read that, because I too had believed the Dark Arts were poorly defined in canon. But they're really not. It's just that the definition doesn't fit into our familiar little fictional mythology of good guys and bad guys.

I was expecting a definition of what the bad guys do and the good guys don't. But that's not it. They are something that people have to fight, period. As Snape tells Draco, it's childish to think that you won't have to fight them if you're on their side. And, as the books demonstrate, it's also childish to think that you'll be prevented from using them if you're not on their side.

Sometimes it's cruel and selfish leaders and their deluded henchmen who are doing those things, and sometimes it's generally protective and generous people trying to protect themselves or seek revenge. 

Canon shows us a war of good against evil, but it's not being fought by good people on one side and evil people on the other. It's not even being fought by saints against sinners. What I see is  sinful people who think it's worth the effort to try to be virtuous, to try to stop people from hurting each other,  against sinful people who think it isn't. 

Are you saying it was authorial sloppiness that Fake!Moody was an effective teacher?  Didn't Mussolini made the trains run on time? Do  horrible people have to be shown as horrible at everything they do? 

Pippin