Various very spoilerish responses and a further question

[psychic_serpent]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Phyllis" 
<erisedstraeh2002 at y...> wrote:
> And again, I'm sorry, but I can't see any way that Harry is 
> carrying a horcrux.  Voldemort hasn't been able to get anywhere 
> close to him (other than in the graveyard in GoF, and we witnessed 
> that scene, and there was no horcrux-planting going on).  

It's the scar.

Voldemort inadvertantly creates the horcrux when he tries and fails 
to kill Harry when he's a baby.  He was probably going to Godric's 
Hollow to get an artifact from Gryffindor to use for the last 
horcrux, so he only had two out of the seven portions of his soul 
left.  (Thrice refusing to give up the artifact may be how James and 
Lily defied him.)  James's death served the purpose of providing the 
death that would allow Voldemort to create the horcrux, while 
Harry's death was meant to get Prophecy Boy out of his way; Lily 
wasn't meant to die because Snape asked her to be spared, in all 
likelihood.  But since she made trouble Voldemort had no 
compunctions about killing her, even though Snape gave him the 
prophecy.  Her sacrifice changed everything, creating the blood 
protection that caused the AK curse to backfire on Voldemort, 
dividing what was left of his soul into two parts, one of which went 
into Harry's scar (imbuing him with some of Voldemort's powers, such 
as Parseltongue) and the other part becoming a bodiless spirit.

Jo said that the question we should really be asking is WHY DIDN'T 
VOLDEMORT DIE?  The clue is in the very first chapter.  Fudge says 
this:

"That is--I don't know--is a man alive if he can't be killed?" [page 
11, US edition] 

It is possibly the most important thing that he says.  IS Voldemort 
alive if he can't be killed?  "Neither can live while the other 
survives," is what the prophecy says.  Perhaps Voldemort cannot be 
said to be living, technically, while Harry survives, because Harry 
has part of his soul inside him (the scar), so while Harry-the-
Horcrux lives Voldemort cannot be killed, ergo, he is not 
technically alive.  Harry also cannot be killed because his mother's 
love is protecting him, so since it was not possible for Voldemort 
to kill Harry, technically HE is not alive either (by the same 
definition, that to live is to be someone who can be killed).  But 
it is, according to the prophecy, only while Voldemort survives in 
some form that Harry is not able to be killed, so it would seem that 
Harry CAN be killed once Voldemort--and all of his soul--is truly 
gone.  So Harry himself does not need to be "destroyed"--only his 
scar.  I believe that this will be the last word of the last book 
because he will no longer have it but he WILL survive.

I also have some detailed notes on Chapters 1 and 2 on my LJ:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/psychic_serpent/

(The part about Fudge's quote is in the notes on Chapter 1 but I 
didn't mention the scar being the horcrux yet.)

--Barb