Forgiveness

[Catlady (Rita Prince]

No: HPFGUIDX 188703

Bart wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/188702>:

<< Here is the problem. The question is whether or not Voldemort was
capable of making a choice. JKR wrote him as a sociopath/psychopath,
who, at least in the real world, does not have a choice, at least not
one to repent. >>

k12listmomma wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/188699>:

<< Clearly, young Riddle was not a psychopath, was he? I don't see in the books where the student Tom Riddle (preHorcrux) was anything but a normal child. >>

I truly believe that Rowling intended to show the child Tom Riddle as abnormal. 

HBP chapter 13, The Secret Riddle. Mrs Cole at the orphanage says "He's a funny boy." "He was a funny baby too. He hardly ever cried, you know. And then, when he got a little older, he was. . . odd."  "He scares the other children." "There have been incidents. . . . Nasty things ..." "Billy Stubbs's rabbit. . . well, Tom said he didn't do it and I don't see how he could have done, but even so, it didn't hang itself from the rafters, did it?" "But I'm jiggered if I know how he got up there to do it. All I know is he and Billy had argued the day before. And then" — Mrs. Cole took another swig of gin, slopping a little over her chin this time — "on the summer outing — we take them out, you know, once a year, to the countryside or to the seaside — well, Amy Benson and Dennis Bishop were never quite right afterwards, and all we ever got out of them was that they'd gone into a cave with Tom Riddle. He swore they'd just gone exploring, but something happened in there, I'm sure of it. And, well, there have been a lot of things, funny things. . . ." 

Geoff quoted in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/188700>:

> "Exactly," said Dumbledore, beaming once more. "Which makes 
> you very different from Tom Riddle. It is our choices, Harry, that 
> show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."'

But listies have always pointed out that Dumbledore said "show" what we truly are, not "make us" what we truly are.

It may have been Tom Riddle's choices that made him a monster or it may have been Tom Riddle's inexorable fate to be a monster, but either way it is true that his choices SHOWED he was a monster.