Our changing perception of characters

[Geoff]

No: HPFGUIDX 192304

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "annemehr"  wrote:

Annemehr:
> Here's another question: over the course of the series, did your opinion change drastically about any of the characters?  

Geoff:
I looked at this question and have finally managed to find time to put 
fingers to keyboard with my views. I think my initial answer is "Yes, I 
have changed my views in some cases" but that I believe it was the 
intention of JKR that we should.

One of the things I have remarked on in the past is that Jo Rowling has 
a surprising handle on the way in which teenaged males think and 
behave, considering that she does not have a son. In the progression of 
the books, we largely see events through Harry's eyes as he progresses 
from the naïve new pupil of eleven at the opening of PS to the battle-
experienced and somewhat world-weary almost eighteen year-old at 
the end of DH – the proper end in my opinion.

Therefore, we see characters initially through the eyes of a boy in 
transition from childhood to adolescence and, by the end, to adulthood.

One of the delights of JKR's writing has been that I can so easily see 
myself in him, often making the same sort of mistakes or having bouts 
of enthusiasm which then fizzle out– and even making an equally big 
fool of myself at a college ball!

One of my headmasters under whom I worked once said to me when we 
were discussing First Year pupils was "They have not yet lost the magic 
of childhood". 

Harry enters the scene as a boy switching to secondary school – leaving a 
place, which even if he wasn't happy there, was familiar – to go into a 
probably larger and frightening world. Nowadays, most pupils change to 
senior school at thirteen so that the switch is not so worrying. At that age, 
for many of us, life was made up of good people and bad people; wearers 
respectively of symbolically white or black hats. So Harry initially categorises 
folk he meets into these groups. Ron, Neville and the rest of the dormitory 
"gang" – Seamus and Dean – are in the first list as are Hagrid, Professor 
Dumbledore and perhaps the redoubtable Professor McGonagall. Into the 
second group certainly go Snape, Draco and his minders for starters.

However, as time goes on, Harry realises, as we all do through those years, 
that there are no fully white or black hat wearers. Only folk of varying shades 
of grey. And as time goes on, his view – and ours as onlookers – begin to 
embrace this fact. Perhaps the one person whom you might query is 
Voldemort who was surely black, but at some point – perhaps as a tiny child 
there must have been a flicker of good before his childhood was shattered 
and his time in the orphanage destroyed any chance to divert him from the 
desire for revenge which grew within him. 

But then look at Harry and Draco as mirror images. Harry, supposedly all 
light: he showed another side with his brashness and stubbornness; his ill
-will for Draco; his thoughtless actions; use of Unforgiveables; using a 
dangerous unknown spell which nearly made him a murderer. And yet – 
he turned back at considerable peril to rescue Draco from the fire. Draco, 
seemingly a sworn enemy of Harry, an opponent of the light: who couldn't 
bring himself to kill Dumbledore; who refused to identify Harry at the 
Manor; who was terrified at Voldemort's casual killing of Charity Burbage.

I could go on. Dumbledore is revealed not to be quite so squeaky clean; 
Harry had begun to wonder whether he had been manipulated, certainly 
heightened by Aberforth's revelations although I do wonder if it were also 
that he wanted to keep Harry from following Tom Riddle's example with a 
similar abused childhood. But the realisation that Horcruxes had come into 
the equation changed things - Snape's memories of the conversation where 
Dumbledore seemed almost casual in his agreement with Snape's horrified 
question that "the boy must die?".

And the last enigma I shall consider. Snape. I still find it impossible to like 
him: the revelations at the end of DH came out of left field, that he had loved 
Lily do not lessen my anger that he had been so hard on Harry, the innocent 
recipient of his overarching hate for James. My opinion changed to take on 
board that he had cause for bitterness but not to the extent he took it.

So, yes, my views have changed. But I reiterate that I believe that it has been 
JKR's intention for this to happen. that we have on several occasions met 
characters who turned out to be the opposite of our first impression and 
the point that, as in the real world, we often have to re-evaluate our thoughts 
about people we know -  or think we know.