[HPforGrownups] Re: CHAPTER DISCUSSION: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Chapter 12: The Pat

[Beccy Talmy]

No: HPFGUIDX 189955

> > Potioncat:
> > <snip> What do you think the portraits think of themselves?
> > To me they are interactive portraits of headmasters, but do
> > they think they are real? Honestly, Nick and Myrtle and the
> > other ghosts seem very real to me--not just imprints at all.
>
> Pippin:
> Maybe the problem is the way we are using the word "real" .
> The body Myrtle had as a living girl remained to be discovered
> in the bathroom, yet her ghost occupies a body which is the
> silvery image of it as it was when she died, spots, glasses
> and all, as real as anything else in the WW. It could be the
> same with the soul. The soul that Myrtle had as a living girl
> went on, but at the same time left its imprint on the magical
> world as a ghost.
>
> It's interesting to think that the ghost preserves things that
> the original soul might be glad to leave behind. I doubt that
> Nick's departed soul cares that he wasn't properly decapitated
> --and that body must have fallen to dust, head and all, a long
> time ago. <snip>


Hello,

Isn't the point more that people who choose to become ghosts
choose to remain on earth as an imprint of a living being rather
than going on and embracing death? So that Nick's explanation of
being a ghost matches up to the word 'imprint' in Snape's, but
only if by 'imprint' we mean 'less than alive but not in the
afterlife' rather than 'imprint while the real thing has gone
on'? And Snape is distinguishing ghosts from inferi, so the point
is that ghosts are incorporeal but do contain the person who has
died, whereas inferi are corporeal but the person has gone on?

Truth.


--
'It is the choices society makes that causes someone to be disabled.
Organise things differently, and they are suddenly enabled.'