Dumbledore

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 190923

Alla:
> Posting from Blackberry, am going to delete the whole post I am responding to for that reason, it is either that or top post.
> 
> Why Dumbledore use commanding language in that situation? Frankly besides JKR wanting to impress upon us how much more serious the situation is than usual I have no idea. It is not like Harry disobeys him when he uses gentler turn of phrase. By the way I totally agree that Harry questions Dumbledore'sjudgment all the time and does not obey him all the time when he is younger. I said that Dumbledore trained him that eventually Harry obeys him in everything no matter which words he used.

Pippin:
There's a name for theories that have to be supported by saying that JKR should have written the books differently. It's AU.  What gets frustrating for me is if a theory repeatedly veers into AU territory without the poster realizing it. As you say, every bit of ESE!Lupin theory had canon support, and believe me, my books were dotted with post-its for every bit and it was a sad moment for me when I pulled them all out. ::Sigh::

Canon fact is, the books do distinguish, plainly and unmistakably, between Dumbledore giving Harry information and Dumbledore giving Harry orders.  

In fact, HBP begins with Dumbledore telling Harry that he has come to the limits of his knowledge and everything he tells Harry henceforward is open to doubt and question. 

It isn't only younger Harry  who often disobeys or ignores Dumbledore's instructions, for example forgetting about getting Slughorn's memories, or all the Hogwarts rules which Harry breaks, sometimes just for the fun of it. I don't remember Dumbledore instructing Harry that it was okay to use a toenail growing hex or pass off the Half-blood Prince's work as his own. 

The oath at the end of HBP marks a change in their relationship, from teacher and pupil to captain and soldier. I agree that it's necessary because what Harry and Dumbledore are about to attempt is more dangerous than anything Harry has tried to do with Dumbledore's knowledge.  This is not a training exercise or a sporting event on the Hogwarts grounds: they are setting out to steal a treasure protected by the most murderous dark wizard who ever existed. Dumbledore is not going to have time to argue or explain, and he can't explain in advance because he has no idea what sort of magic they are going to encounter.

But it was Harry's choice to maintain that relationship after Dumbledore had died. Harry's reasons for doing that are complicated, IMO.  Just as  with his father and Sirius, Harry doesn't want to have to believe that Dumbledore ever did anything seriously wrong or made any really bad mistakes -- except for trusting Snape, of course -- and that prevents him from seeing that he is repeating some of Dumbledore's mistakes himself. 

But Harry didn't think Dumbledore was incapable of making mistakes when Dumbledore was alive. It's partly Harry's own fear of death that is at work, I think. He wants to divide those who have died into innocent victims and villains -- there's no room in there for people whose mistakes contributed to a death which, nonetheless, they did not deserve. Because if that could happen to the people that Harry admires most, then it could happen to Harry, and Harry isn't ready to face that. 

IIRC, JKR does something with Dumbledore and Harry that she doesn't do with Harry and the other characters -- they don't have any summarized conversations or interactions off the page. She's  concerned, in other words, that we know exactly, word for word, everything that Dumbledore said to him. That makes every word significant.  

Certainly I agree that Dumbledore was attempting to form Harry's character as well as impart information and skills. But that's not a bad thing, IMO.  That is what education is supposed to do, not only give us knowledge but a moral and philosophical framework for using it. 

Dumbledore does want Harry to believe that one person can make a difference. And I think JKR wants to show us that, not just because the genre demands it, but because it's what she believes. She could have chosen a different genre, after all. The books  show not only that one person can make a difference but why, sometimes, one person has to. 

The WW is a society that has forgotten how to trust, so much that what sounds like the blandest platitudes to us --"we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided"-- is treated as radical nonsense by most of the WW. What Harry did by walking into the forest was help to restore that trust, by showing that one person could   treat every life as if it was  worth the same and every life was worth dying for. 

It is interesting that we all have different theories about exactly what it was that enabled Harry to survive the Forest AK. According to JKR's website, that is intentional. She did not want it to be 'scientific' -- which means it couldn't be scientific for Dumbledore either. He only had theoretical knowledge of how a living horcrux might be destroyed without killing its container, and could not tell whether possessing two of the Hallows, sharing blood with Voldemort, or something unquantifiable about Harry himself might enable Harry to survive.
But  he had to hope it would be so. 

He did not want Harry to make a hot-headed, rash decision about the hallows, or about destroying the horcrux in himself,  before Harry fully understood what his choices were. But he was hampered because Harry did not want choices, he wanted certainties, even if the certainty was death. 

We could ask whether Dumbledore would  have wanted Harry to destroy himself to get rid of the horcrux if that was the only way. Dumbledore's triumph, IMO, was in refusing to believe it could be the only way, even in that interval between the destruction of the philosopher's stone and Voldemort's re-embodiment with Harry's blood, when it must have seemed that keeping Harry alive was going to be a losing battle. 

Pippin
who has just realized that 'horcrux' is 'chi rho'  backwards, partially latinized and transposed