CHAPTER DISCUSSION: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Chapter 12: The Pat

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 189941

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> CHAPTER DISCUSSION: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
> Chapter 12: The Patronus. <snip>

>  3. If Dementor can suck a person's soul from them, does it mean that Potterverse does not believe in souls' immortality? If a Dementor dies somehow, would the soul be released? Lupin tells Harry that a soul is gone forever, lost. Where is it lost in your opinion?

Carol responds:

What happens to a soul sucked out by a Dementor is unclear, either because Wizards themselves don't know or because JKR is somewhat vague and inconsistent (as she also is with regard to the fate of the soul-sucked person, which I'll return to in a moment).

I think that a soul in the Potterverse is immortal in the sense that it will go on to the afterlife unless it's destroyed--perhaps in severely damaged form for those few Wizards who have put half their souls into a Horcrux. (I think it was Pippin who said that Voldemort's soul is so severely damaged that he no longer has the ability to "go on" to whatever constitutes the afterlife for Wizards. (I won't even consider how an afterlife for Muggles, who can't become ghosts, fits in here.)

As we see with Voldemort and his Horcruxes, it's possible not only to damage the soul but to destroy it. Once parts of his soul have been removed from his body and placed in a Horcrux, they're dependent on the Horcrux for their existence. Destroy their container and you destroy them. Voldie's soul bits don't go to the bench at King's Cross to wait for him in hopes of being united with the mutilated baby and restored to wholeness if Voldemort repents. They don't hang around as bits of vapor. They simply cease to exist.

I think that something similar must happen to the souls sucked out by Dementors. Possibly, they become part of the evil essence of the Dementor; possibly, they just disappear and become Nothing. Either way, they cease to exist. There can be, as I understand it, no afterlife for the likes of Barty Crouch. Death for him is what Voldemort apparently feared for himself--the end of identity and existence.

As for the body of the soul-sucked person, which is still alive (at least for the time being), we have two versions--the person with his mind and heart still working but without his soul (and therefore his memories and sense of self and conscience) described by Lupin, which sounds like a Dementor in human form--or, perhaps, something like Voldemort, who was down to the last tiny fragment of a soul. If your mind, heart, and stomach are working, you can live (in the sense of subsisting) and eat and think in the sense of figuring out how to carry out your evil deeds (rather like Fenrir Greyback but with no sense of self) but you're no more yourself than an Inferi is.

The other description, which seems to fit Barty Crouch better, is the one depicted in the picture on Snape's DADA classroom wall: "a wizard lying huddled and blank-eyed, slumped against a wall" (HBP ch. 9). A person in that condition is essentially comatose and would probably starve to death unless kept alive by artificial means. Since we never hear about anyone fitting the first description, I think the second must be nearer the mark. The body isn't dead--yet--but it might as well be, and the person himself has no existence in this world or the next. A sad fate indeed.

Carol, who would really rather not think about such things