Secrets (Long) OLD POST REPOST

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186543

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "mesmer44" <winterfell7 at ...> wrote:
>
Steve wrote:
> <snip>
> 
> Although, on one point, perhaps, the lack of one piece of information Snape had from any pov, narrative or otherwise. may have been significant if Snape had been so inclined to consider it.  The info Snape has in the book from the unreliable narrator is that DD testified that Sirius was the Potter's secret keeper. 

Carol responds:
One small clarification: the narrator isn't always unreliable. For example, it's a "fact" within canon that Dumbledore testified that Sirius Black was the Secret Keeper. (Actually, I think this bit of information comes from Dumbledore himself, not the narrator.) The narrator is only unreliable when he (she?) reports events from Harry's point of view as if they were fact. For example, "Snape was going to Crucio him into insanity" (quoted from memory) is immediately revealed as a mistaken view of reality when Snape stops the Crucio but still leaves the impression that Snape is evil. I've given other examples of things that Harry believes to be true and the narrator states as fact which turn out to be false. The narrator and the characters together often misdirect the reader, particularly with regard to Snape's motives but also in other instances. That doesn't mean that we can never trust the narrator. If the narrator says that Harry was late to Potions class, Harry was late to Potions class. But sometimes there's more to the narrator's reports than we realize--for example, the little girl whose scales Hermione repairs is not a little girl but Gregory Goyle and the Vanishing Cabinet that Harry passes in the Room of Requirement is the very Vanishing Cabinet that Draco is repairing in the Room of Requirement (and Harry is in the very room he's been trying unsuccessfully to get into). It's a very sophisticated literary device for misleading the reader and, sometimes, dropping hints or clues at the same time. (JKR should try her hand at mystery writing. She'd be excellent at it.)

Steve wrote:

If all that was reported (in the Daily Prophet perhaps?) was that DD verified that Sirius was at one time secret keeper, an entirely valid question is "Was he the secret keeper for sure at the time of LV's attack on the Potters?".  Perhaps I'm the only one curious about this, having watched a ton of tv shows where those kinds of questions are always asked by defense attorneys like Perry Mason. <snip>


Carol responds:
You're not the only one who's curious about that. All we know, very indirectly, is that James Potter rejected Dumbledore's offer to be the Secret Keeper, telling him that he intended to give that job to Sirius Black and that Black subsequently convinced him (or them, since Lily had to have been included in the decision) to give the job to Peter Pettigrew. It's unclear whether Black was ever the Secret Keeper. I tend to think that he wasn't since it would probably be hard to transfer a secret from one Keeper to another.

The time frame is inconsistent, too, since in PoA, Peter is made Secret Keeper just a week before the Potters are killed on Halloween, but in DH, the Potters are already in hiding and Peter is already behaving strangely shortly after Harry's first birthday, which means that the letter was written in early August. Harry infers, apparently wrongly, that it was the last time Lily saw "Wormy." If PoA is correct, they kept on seeing him and trusting him into October, and Black only begins to realize the truth when he goes to check on Wormtail on October 31 and finds him missing.

JKR is frustratingly inconsistent from one book to another. I still think she'd be a great mystery writer because she's so good at misdirection, but over a whole series of books, she tends to forget or misremember details (such as Draco's not having the Hand of Glory or, in this case, when Peter was made Secret Keeper). She's still not convinced that twenty-four hours are "missing" from the first chapter of SS/PS. (Why *did* McGonagall have to wait around all day for Hagrid and Dumbledore to show up? We'll probably never know.)

Carol, who wonders whether JKR's desk as shown on her website reveals a general tendency to be disorganized and to forget where she put things (such as a reference to a particular object, spell, or motif)