[HPforGrownups] Re: Forgiveness

[k12listmomma]

No: HPFGUIDX 188705

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.


Shelley:
I'm going to add in another thought, one that I had originally intended to 
convey. The orphanage incident shows Riddle's first murder of an animal, but 
at Hogwarts, again preHorcrux, he refrained from being a bully, controlled 
himself and did not commit murder. He was shown as having the respect of 
teachers and students alike. He attended social functions as part of the 
Slug Club, and people aren't saying the same things of Riddle as Mrs. Cole 
describes of the younger child without magical training. Doesn't this show, 
contrary to the mental illness claim of one not being able to make choices, 
a clear indicator that he was capable of self-restraint and good behavior, 
of making good choices? They were not calling young Tom Riddle, Hogwarts 
student, a pyshopath. Instead people were shocked when he decided to go down 
this path, based on the student they knew at Hogwarts. Whatever the change 
ripping one's soul makes, I still say that most of the ill effects we see in 
Voldemort is a direct result of that decision to make Horcruxes, and not 
from a pre-existing mental illness that would have been impossible to hide 
from age 12 to age 17. If he had a choice to control his actions in those 5 
years, what would have taken away that ability to make a choice to repent 
later on? I still think they were possible, even for a monster that 
Voldemort chose to become.