Snape investigating Potters' Betrayal WAS: Re: Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186541

Carol earlier:
> <HUGE SNIP>
> It's Sirius's supposed betrayal of Lily, not the "Prank" or SWM, that makes Snape so determined to turn in the man he thinks has been trying all year to murder Harry.
> <EVEN LARGER SNIP>
> 
> Alla responded:
> 
> I disagree with interpretation being written as if it is a fact. I am sure Sirius' alleged betrayal of Lily played a role, but I do not remember any canon stating that Prank played no role in Snape's hatred and desire to see Sirius' to become dementors' food and plenty of canon stating an opposite. 

Carol again:
Sorry. I meant "IMO," of course. (Twenty years of writing academic essays got me in the habit of stating the point I intend to support as a direct assertion without qualifiers like "I think" or "in my view" or "IMO." Hard habit to break.)

At any rate, you're right, of course, that it's my opinion, not a canon fact, and I didn't mean that the so-called Prank played no role at all, only that it wasn't Snape's primary motivation, IMO. (More on that later.)

However, it *is* a fact (within canon) that Snape thinks Black entered the castle to murder Harry and that Lupin has been helping him all year. That assumption (also made by Dumbledore, Fudge, Mr. Weasley, and everyone else except Sirius Black himself and Pettigrew) would naturally strengthen Snape's view that Black betrayed the Potters to their deaths. Even Lupin acknowledges that Snape is there to save Harry ("Severus, you're making a mistake. . . . Sirius is not here to kill Harry"), and Snape himself makes his purpose clear:
"I have just saved your neck. You should be thanking me on bended knee! You would have been well served if he killed you!").

Granted, Snape is not only mistaken here but uncharacteristically irrational, absolutely certain that he's right and unwilling to listen to Lupin, but Lupin makes matters worse by calling Snape a fool and blaming his behavior on a schoolboy grudge, which not only infuriates Snape more but convinces Harry (and, through him, the reader) that Snape's only motivation is the so-called Prank. 

Lupin, as we see in HBP after Snape kills Dumbledore, has no more idea that Snape loved Lily than Harry does. That his motivation in the Shrieking Shack (aside from saving Harry and his friends) would be to avenge *Lily* by returning Black to Azkaban never enters his head, or that of any of the other characters. Blaming his desire for vengeance on the "Prank" is misdirection, a partial truth masquerading as the whole truth, which neither Harry nor the reader will learn until "The Prince's Tale" and which Lupin (who also doesn't know that Snape's Sectumsempra saved his life) never learns at all.

As I said before, not only does Snape have every reason to believe that Sirius Black betrayed the Potters and no reason to think otherwise, hating him and blaming him helps Snape to bear the burden of his own guilt. Yes, Snape would think, I reported the Prophecy to Voldemort, but I went first to Voldemort and then to Dumbledore to protect Lily and promised to do "anything" if Dumbledore would protect her. But Dumbledore's efforts to protect Lily (and, of course, James and Harry) were in vain because James Potter trusted Sirius Black and made him the Secret Keeper. That, IMO, is why Snape is so furious at Black and the dead James--if it weren't for James Potter's blind trust in his friend, Lily would still be alive. (In DH, Dumbledore reinforces this belief, saying to the desperately grieving young Snape, "She {Lily] and James put their faith in the wrong person" and comparing their faith in their unworthy Secret Keeper to his own hope that Voldemort would spare Lily (DH Am. ed. 678), a comparison that Snape seems to hear only half of given his subsequent virulent hatred of the man he thinks is Lily's betrayer. In a way, he's right, but, of course, the friend that James trusted was Peter Pettigrew, not Black.

At any rate, IMO, we can only properly understand the Shrieking Shack sequence, which makes Snape look almost psychotically furious and vengeful despite the fact that he's risked his life going after a man he thinks is a murderer who intends to kill again (partly right, partly mistaken) and a werewolf who's about to transform (completely right) whom he views (wrongly) as the "murderer's" accomplice. Only when we read "The Prince's Tale" and see the torment that Snape undergoes when Lily dies and then see his Patronus can we understand what Lily meant to him. Only then can we understand that Dumbledore is right and Harry and Lupin wrong in HBP when they believe that the remorse was feigned, that Snape hated James (true) and held Lily in contempt as a "Mudblood" (false, even though he used the term in a moment of rage and humiliation that he could not take back).

That Snape would scapegoat Black as Harry later scapegoats Snape with regard to Black's death seems natural to me and seems borne out when we reread Snape's behavior in the Shrieking Shack in the light of "The Prince's Tale." Just my own opinion, of course.

So, yes, the Prank plays a part in shaping Snape's view of Black and comes back into play as the basis of their mutual antagonism in OoP (along with Black's view that Snape is an unreformed Death Eater out to sabotage Harry, yet another instance of what a character "knows" shaping his actions and reactions, in this case, intensifying Harry's distrust of Snape in the Occlumency lessons). Had the so-called Prank and SWM not occurred, Snape might not have hated Lily's "betrayer" so intensely. But Lily was everything to Snape, as we see from his Patronus and his clinging to his unrequited love for her until the moment of his death. Her loss (and his own role in it) is so unendurable that he wants to die. The only thing that keeps him from suicide, if I'm reading "The Prince's Tale" correctly, is his mission to keep Lily's death from being in vain. Much as he resents the schoolboy bullying of MWPP, especially James and Sirius, they are, as someone on this list said, "small potatoes" compared with Lily's death. And just as Lily's death motivates almost everything he does as spy and Harry's protector and subverter of Voldemort, it's surely Lily's death, not the so-called Prank, that pushes him almost to the brink of madness in the Shrieking Shack and afterward.

Carol, just expressing her own view of the way the new information in "The Prince's Tale" reshapes the reader's initial interpretation of Snape in PoA