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

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 186693

> Betsy Hp:
> I don't think it's left for the reader, actually.  Certainly a reader *can* go back and reexamine the times Harry may have stumbled, but since the context is never changed (Draco is never recast as a victim in the ferret scene; Harry casting the cruciatus is never written as a moral mistake) I believe they're going against the text when they do so.  I think the reader is expected to just follow along after Harry and adopt his views as their own.  Especially by series end when he has it all figured out.

Carol responds:

Quite possibly it depends on the reader. But even an unsophisticated eleven-year-old kid reading GoF for the second time will see him differently now that he knows that "Moody" is a Death Eater. Older, more sophisticated readers will certainly question any of Moody's actions that seemed okay to them at the time and rethink them in relation to his real motives. (Was he being kind to Neville? Clearly not. Was he really helping Harry? Well, yes, helping him to cheat, but with an ulterior motive. What about those Unforgiveable Curses in class? Notice anything odd about that prolonged Crucio? And what about Draco, then? Was the punishment deserved or was Moody acting cruelly? I think that McGonagall's shocked reaction ("Is that a student?") indicates that he was going overboard (as does "We don't use Transfiguration on students") and if we didn't notice Draco's squeals of pain the first time around, we'll notice them the second. (Harry, however, doesn't have the opportunity to reevaluate the scene.)

Also, surely by this time all but the most unsophisticated reader will have noticed how often Harry is wrong in his judgments. He pitied Quirrell and suspected Snape in SS/PS. He thought (admittedly, with good cause) that Sirius Black was trying to murder him. He thought that "Moody" was just a paranoid Auror trying (despite tournament rules) to help him win the TWT. Many people suspected that he was dead wrong about Snape's being evil long before that point. It was clear that Harry's judgment as to what was happening and whether a person or action was "good" could not altogether be trusted. Call it the unreliable narrator or "the Harry filter"--many readers could see scenes like the bouncing ferret incident much more clearly than Harry could--and certainly much more clearly than Ron, whose judgment tends to be even more immature and unsophisticated than Harry's.

If a reader can't think for him or herself with regard to the ferret incident even on a rereading, even knowing that "Moody" is a DE who thinks nothing of killing his own father or Crucioing a spider with obvious enjoyment in front of the boy whose parents he helped Crucio into insanity, even noting that he dislikes Draco and says so, that reader can refer to a respected adult authority figure, Minerva McGonagall, to determine whether to approve of the punishment or not. (Granted, McG's judgment can also be at fault, as in the Crucio incident!) But here, she indicates clearly that Dumbledore disapproves of Transfiguration as a punishment. And if he disapproves of turning Draco into a ferret, what would he think of *bouncing* him?

And don't forget Hermione, who says, "He could have really hurt Malfoy, though. It was good, really, that Professor McGonagall stopped it" (207). Ron protests at this idea but Harry says nothing. Then we have the Twins and Lee saying, "Moody! How cool is he?" with regard to the day's lesson. And that lesson, we can guess, involves torturing and killing spiders and Imperiusing his own students to demonstrate the Unforgiveable Curses. Not so cool after all, as even an eleven-year-old reader will realize the second time around.  

True, *Harry* doesn't rethink the punishment, but the time has not yet come for him to reassess Draco or for Draco himself to change. We can't expect Harry at fourteen to apply the insights that he will gain from seeing Draco failing to kill Dumbledore in HBP and being forced to Crucio fellow DEs in DH. Harry's judgment of various characters matures at different times. It's too soon for him to see Draco clearly, and by the time he does, he's seen much worse things than Draco the bouncing ferret. (Draco himself has probably forgotten it though, of course, we don't know for sure.

As for Fake!Moody, there's no point in *Harry's* reassessing his actions. Harry knows what he really was, and he's no longer a threat. He has other things to think about, and other lessons to learn.

We, as readers, know as much as Harry does about Barty Jr. at the end of the books. We have the luxury that he doesn't have of going back to reexamine those events from an informed perspective. We also have the advantage of having read the whole series and knowing how very much DD and Snape and others have concealed from Harry and just how unreliable his perspective is, especially in the early books. One of the pleasures of a careful reading is watching his view of individual characters change (and I'm including Luna and Neville and even Dobby along with Snape and Dumbledore). As the series draws to a close, his perspective of those characters becomes clearer and closer to the perspective of a careful reader who examines the textual evidence without "the Harry filter."

There are, no doubt, readers who still approve of the bouncing ferret incident and still think it's funny. But I don't think that's how JKR expects the thoughtful and observant reader to feel.

Carol, who thinks that we *have* to read against the text because we, as readers, know more than Harry does and we can't fully trust his pov or his opinions until the epilogue (and we can choose to disagree with him even then)