Point of view in the HP books (again) Was: Bigotry in the Potterverse

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 188167

Rick wrote:

> A little geeky here, but JKR switches back and forth between Harry's 1st person narrative and a wonky kind of 3rd person limited-omniscience POV--like watching a movie shot by a tipsy elf with a camcorder perched on Harry's shoulder--so we seldom know much more than what Harry can do, see, think, or feel or, more accurately sometimes, what Harry THINKS he does, sees, thinks or feels.  <snip>

Carol responds:
Actually, the narrative in the HP books is never first-person unless someone, for instance Hagrid in the Grawp chapter in PoA, is telling his own story. (First person, as I'm sure you know, is "I" or "we.") The story is usually told from the third-person limited perspective, IOW a narrator who is not Harry seeing from his point of view, which means that the narration is occasionally unreliable because Harry is wrong about what's about to happen (like dying from a Crucio or being killed by LV) or oblivious to a detail (such as the "little girls" in HBP being the Polyjuiced Crabbe and Goyle) or just wrong about another character and his motivation (Snape). There are other examples, but those will do for the moment.

You're right, though, that JKR occasionally slips out of his point of view to indicate, for example, that he forgot a dream or to show him asleep or to show other characters. She briefly writes from Hermione's point of view in SS/Ps when she's watching Harry play Quidditch and setting Snape's robes on fire. She points out that Neville is awake and Harry doesn't know it. She writes whole chapters from a Muggle's point of view (Frank Bryce in GoF and the Muggle prime minister in HBP, still using third-person limited omniscient but not from Harry's perspective. Ditto for Voldemort's point of view in the scar-link scenes, which sometimes becomes interestingly tangled with Harry's, as if he's not sure who he is.

On several occasions, she uses the dramatic point of view, outside of any character's mind, depicting them all from the outside as if they were on a stage ("Spinner's End," "The Dark Lord Rising," the chapter or partial chapter about the Muggles reacting to the murder of the Riddles in GoF). The first chapter of SS/PS is somewhere between the omniscient point of view (she can get into any mind she likes but usually doesn't) and the dramatic point of view just described.

At any rate, I agree that when she's using third-person limited to show Harry's perspective, we're limited to what he sees or thinks he sees and to his interpretation of the evidence (or our own counter-interpretation when we think or know that he's wrong).

And I agree that he's really not interested in other people. He himself realizes after the fact that he never thought about Dumbledore as having a past or being young. He also realizes that he's never asked Neville why he was raised by his grandmother. He never asks Hermione about her parents (except whether they might know who Nicholas Flamel is, which she dismisses as unlikely because they're both dentists--aka Muggles who couldn't possibly know anything about the WW, which perhaps shows her ignorance more than theirs, but I digress.) He doesn't know the names of Slytherin students in his Potions and CoMC classes or most Ravenclaws or Hufflepuffs (with a few exceptions like Ernie, Hannah, and Justin Finch-Fletchley) who aren't on the Quidditch team. He doesn't even know the names of people in his own house, Cormac MacLaggen and Romilda Vane being cases in point.

At any rate, the only way we find out about people other than Harry is through Harry's encounters with them and his not always accurate interpretation of them. He only occasionally asks questions--partly, I suppose, the Dursleys' fault but mostly, IMO, a simple lack of curiosity on his part. He's preoccupied with his scar or Voldemort or Quidditch or whatever mystery he's solving. For a supposedly unselfish person who loves the WW and sacrifices himself to save it, he's remarkably focused on himself--which is not to downplay his predicament as Voldemort's chief target or to deny his capacity to love a few friends. He's singled out, stared at, loved, hated, and depended on by near or complete strangers and he's Dumbledore's "favorite boy." It would be very hard to pay sufficient attention to other people and their needs (unless their lives are in danger) in such circumstances, even the needs of his best friend.

Carol, who has clearly strayed from bigotry in the Potterverse!