Harry/Tom Riddle/Voldemort.
This one’s obvious. Voldemort is Harry’s main adversary. Without his never-ending attempts to kill our hero, there’s simply no story, and we’ve known since we learned the prophecy that once one of them kills the other, it also will be the end of the storyline. The knowledge that Harry must finally have is the knowledge of how to defeat Voldemort once and for all—which, again, is going to be through his power of love. Yet given this reality, the truly fascinating thing is that in so many ways, Voldemort/Tom Riddle is Harry’s shadow self.
We’ve seen this hammered home over and over again. When Voldemort failed in his attempt to kill Harry as a baby, he put something of himself into Harry. In the ultimate CoS scene, the shade of Tom Riddle recognizes and explicitly states similarities between himself and Harry. In OotP, the entire plot revolves around the fact that Harry and Voldemort are connected, and that Harry thus has access to a lot of knowledge that nobody else has. According to Dumbledore, however, this knowledge is too dangerous to have; it’s not worth the price.
In the climax of OotP, of course, we see one big reason why: Voldemort was able to plant false information in Harry’s head, leading him to the Department of Mysteries. If this had not happened, Sirius would not have died. There definitely seems to be a theme in OotP of Harry getting too much knowledge on the one hand and too little on the other, and both extremes are harmful.
Yet I wonder, too, if this is the only reason why it was so dangerous for Harry to have access to Voldemort’s mind and thoughts. I believe that there remains a great deal to be seen in Book 7 on this topic, and that we do not yet know enough to judge what the conclusion of the relationship between Harry and Voldemort might be, although I will speak to that issue further in the conclusion of this presentation. So—very important, and yet, Harry’s adversarial relationship with both Draco and Snape is at least as significant in terms of looking forward to how this series could end.
Harry/Draco.
Clearly, this relationship could be a whole day-long lecture in itself. To try to keep it under some kind of control, I will cover primarily Draco’s role in the hero’s journey narrative.
As with many other relationships in Harry Potter’s world, the tone for Harry and Draco Malfoy’s entire relationship is set at their first meeting. It’s important to note that on that occasion, Draco offers Harry not only philos—friendship-- but also knowledge about the wizarding world. And Harry turns down both philos and knowledge from Draco, accepting them from Ron instead. This refusal wins him Draco’s enmity from that day forward; it’s fascinating, in fact, to speculate on how differently Harry might have ended up feeling about Draco and how much knowledge he might have if he’d accepted Draco’s offer of philos. Since he did not, however, Draco became the subverted or shadow companion.
He plays the role of the Dragon, which is a very important one in the hero’s journey. However, Draco is really a subverted dragon as well, playing the part of the dragon that is the one within the hero’s self. “Slaying the dragon” in a hero’s journey can refer to the killing of actual dragons (such as the myth of St. George and the dragon) or monsters (such as Beowulf,) or it can be a metaphor for the hero’s inner quest. In light of the idea that Harry’s true quest is for knowledge, this idea is especially interesting.
One thing that Draco has consistently done throughout the entire Harry Potter series is to pretend to have knowledge that he does not have, and to attempt to get more. His role in CoS is really fascinating from this point of view, particularly since Hermione, Ron, and Harry Polyjuice themselves and descend into the underworld of the Slytherin dungeons in order to find out what knowledge he has. A bit later in the book, Draco actually holds Tom Riddle’s diary in his hands briefly, before Harry gets it back. In other words, he touches knowledge, but cannot hold it. And that’s really the end of Draco playing a major role in the series until HBP, when he comes back with a vengeance.
In HBP, the most obvious central mystery is exactly what Draco knows that no-one else at Hogwarts is ever able to find out, but Harry suspects. At the end, of course, we learn that Draco has received knowledge at last—he is a Death Eater, he knows Voldemort, he knows how to get other DE’s into the school, , but that it is tainted—dark, dangerous, and forbidden, the shadow side of the knowledge that Harry is trying to get. Ultimately, Draco is willing to give up this knowledge, although he does not quite get the chance to do it. This, I believe, is the real reason why Harry feels his very first positive emotion towards Draco. Although we don’t know exactly what will happen with Draco in Book 7, I do talk about this idea at the very end.
In a lot of ways, Draco is paired with Snape in terms of the roles these characters play for Harry, so now, finally, let’s look at Snape.
Harry/Snape.
Harry’s relationship with Severus Snape is a complex, tumultuous, and violent one, and to me, is the most fascinating and the most enigmatic in the entire series. Again, the tone for all of their subsequent interactions was set up at their very first meeting. Snape has secret knowledge, and he made it clear from the first Potions class in Harry’s first year at Hogwarts that it was available only to a select few. And he makes it painfully clear that he doesn’t think Harry will be one of them. This is like a prophecy that finally gets fulfilled in OotP, when Harry repeatedly fails at his lessons in Occlumency with Snape. This also helps to explain the mystery of why so much time and page space was spent on these lessons—they represented Harry’s failure of knowledge where Snape was concerned. In OotP, Harry learns about his father’s moral failings through Snape, and blames Snape for goading Sirius to his death. In HBP, Harry learns that Snape was his parent’s betrayer, and he sees Snape kill Dumbledore. In other words, Harry now blames Snape for the loss of all three of his father figures (and his mother as well.) He actually expresses more literal hatred for Snape than for Voldemort. He even hates himself, I think, for unwittingly getting so much tainted/dark knowledge from Snape through the HBP potions book. For him, the mere idea of getting either love or knowledge through Snape now is anathema.
So, we’ve analyzed Harry’s relationships, and through this, we’ve seen how agape love is presented as being the only kind that is at all likely to defeat Voldemort. We’ve also looked a little at how Harry searches out, receives, and disseminates knowledge—and how he refuses to do so through some relationships in his life. How does all of this come together in order to predict what might happen in Book 7—and what about Snape? This part is speculative, I will warn y’all, and it gets more so as it goes on. It all begins with this quote from an interview that J.K. Rowling gave in 2000 about her religious beliefs:
''Yes, I am [a Christian],'' she says. ''Which seems to offend the religious right far worse than if I said I thought there was no God. Every time I've been asked if I believe in God, I've said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what's coming in the books.'' (Rowling, J.K. Interview with Geordie Greig. Tatler Magazine)
This quote is generally overlooked—but this is a mistake, since I believe that by analyzing it, we can find the ending of the series. So let’s look at how this is done.
At first, I looked for the answer on the most obvious level, which I do think is what J.K. Rowling is literally talking about here, given that she said any intelligent reader could guess it. Both Snape and Voldemort are Harry’s enemies; in fact, at the end of HBP, Harry was expressing more actual hatred towards Snape. So the love that Harry will have to find within himself in Book 7-- and the love that will be so very difficult to find-- will be the central tenet of Christianity, the ultimate agape: love for his enemy. He'll have to forgive and love his two traditional human enemies in this series: Snape and Draco, but Snape will be a whole lot harder and more significant. Every other task Harry has accomplished will seem easy, next to that. All of the other types of love (point to board) have only led up to this.
Some, such as Lynne Milum, have believed that ”Harry’s potential to redeem Voldemort would be the greatest victory of all.” (Milum) So in this paradigm, Harry’s forgiveness would have to be directed towards Voldemort rather than towards Snape and Draco, and that would be his redeeming power of love. There are a couple of problems with this, though.
Perhaps Harry really does have to accept the idea that Voldemort is his shadow self, and I think this was hinted at very extensively in OOtP. But the way that the young Tom Riddle is portrayed in HBP makes this particular interpretation very hard to really believe. We don’t see Tom shown with all the little ambiguities and grey areas that Draco Malfoy had in the first five books, for instance. Tom is an unrelievedly bad seed from the very beginning, from torturing fellow schoolmates to killing bunny rabbits to poisoning witches to murdering his uncle.
An even bigger issue, however, is that actual forgiveness is far more likely to happen between Harry and Snape (and also Draco,) because as normal human beings, Snape and Draco can accept it and Voldemort cannot. Also, in keeping with the traditions of a hero’s journey narrative like Tam Lin, I think that all of Harry’s friends and mentors must be stripped away near the end, at least temporarily. In this case, his relationship with his greatest human enemy, Snape, is then the only key to salvation. The key here is that the way his hatred for Snape is described in HBP and the way he felt Voldemort’s hatred in himself in OotP are the same. Harry has to reject hatred in himself,-- his negative feelings towards Snape and also Draco have been a huge theme in this books, he has to overcome them, I also think that The Atonement with the Father—comes in Book 7, whether it’s with James, Sirius, or Dumbledore, or maybe all three, and I think they’re going to give him the final strength he needs to do this.
However, I also believe that this is not quite the entire story. Now, as most of you probably know, there is a theory that Dumbledore got Snape to agree to kill him during the school year. Dumbledore knew that he was going to die anyway, and he wanted to keep Draco from becoming a murderer. Because Harry had already failed to master Occlumency, he could not be told about this plan. This is a fascinating idea, and I think it’s true, but… I think there’s a very specific hero’s journey narrative that JKR had in mind as a model for this, and it helps us understand exactly how it might play out.
+++
Thanks to all the reviewers! :)
There's one part of the essay left, and then there's the extra D/G info, which wasn't included in the presentation. I might tack that onto the end of the essay, or it might have its own section-- depends on exactly how long it turns out to be.
The next chapter of KC is done!! Y'all know that I like to wait until I have a few, though. But it's a nice one... :)
This one’s obvious. Voldemort is Harry’s main adversary. Without his never-ending attempts to kill our hero, there’s simply no story, and we’ve known since we learned the prophecy that once one of them kills the other, it also will be the end of the storyline. The knowledge that Harry must finally have is the knowledge of how to defeat Voldemort once and for all—which, again, is going to be through his power of love. Yet given this reality, the truly fascinating thing is that in so many ways, Voldemort/Tom Riddle is Harry’s shadow self.
We’ve seen this hammered home over and over again. When Voldemort failed in his attempt to kill Harry as a baby, he put something of himself into Harry. In the ultimate CoS scene, the shade of Tom Riddle recognizes and explicitly states similarities between himself and Harry. In OotP, the entire plot revolves around the fact that Harry and Voldemort are connected, and that Harry thus has access to a lot of knowledge that nobody else has. According to Dumbledore, however, this knowledge is too dangerous to have; it’s not worth the price.
In the climax of OotP, of course, we see one big reason why: Voldemort was able to plant false information in Harry’s head, leading him to the Department of Mysteries. If this had not happened, Sirius would not have died. There definitely seems to be a theme in OotP of Harry getting too much knowledge on the one hand and too little on the other, and both extremes are harmful.
Yet I wonder, too, if this is the only reason why it was so dangerous for Harry to have access to Voldemort’s mind and thoughts. I believe that there remains a great deal to be seen in Book 7 on this topic, and that we do not yet know enough to judge what the conclusion of the relationship between Harry and Voldemort might be, although I will speak to that issue further in the conclusion of this presentation. So—very important, and yet, Harry’s adversarial relationship with both Draco and Snape is at least as significant in terms of looking forward to how this series could end.
Harry/Draco.
Clearly, this relationship could be a whole day-long lecture in itself. To try to keep it under some kind of control, I will cover primarily Draco’s role in the hero’s journey narrative.
As with many other relationships in Harry Potter’s world, the tone for Harry and Draco Malfoy’s entire relationship is set at their first meeting. It’s important to note that on that occasion, Draco offers Harry not only philos—friendship-- but also knowledge about the wizarding world. And Harry turns down both philos and knowledge from Draco, accepting them from Ron instead. This refusal wins him Draco’s enmity from that day forward; it’s fascinating, in fact, to speculate on how differently Harry might have ended up feeling about Draco and how much knowledge he might have if he’d accepted Draco’s offer of philos. Since he did not, however, Draco became the subverted or shadow companion.
He plays the role of the Dragon, which is a very important one in the hero’s journey. However, Draco is really a subverted dragon as well, playing the part of the dragon that is the one within the hero’s self. “Slaying the dragon” in a hero’s journey can refer to the killing of actual dragons (such as the myth of St. George and the dragon) or monsters (such as Beowulf,) or it can be a metaphor for the hero’s inner quest. In light of the idea that Harry’s true quest is for knowledge, this idea is especially interesting.
One thing that Draco has consistently done throughout the entire Harry Potter series is to pretend to have knowledge that he does not have, and to attempt to get more. His role in CoS is really fascinating from this point of view, particularly since Hermione, Ron, and Harry Polyjuice themselves and descend into the underworld of the Slytherin dungeons in order to find out what knowledge he has. A bit later in the book, Draco actually holds Tom Riddle’s diary in his hands briefly, before Harry gets it back. In other words, he touches knowledge, but cannot hold it. And that’s really the end of Draco playing a major role in the series until HBP, when he comes back with a vengeance.
In HBP, the most obvious central mystery is exactly what Draco knows that no-one else at Hogwarts is ever able to find out, but Harry suspects. At the end, of course, we learn that Draco has received knowledge at last—he is a Death Eater, he knows Voldemort, he knows how to get other DE’s into the school, , but that it is tainted—dark, dangerous, and forbidden, the shadow side of the knowledge that Harry is trying to get. Ultimately, Draco is willing to give up this knowledge, although he does not quite get the chance to do it. This, I believe, is the real reason why Harry feels his very first positive emotion towards Draco. Although we don’t know exactly what will happen with Draco in Book 7, I do talk about this idea at the very end.
In a lot of ways, Draco is paired with Snape in terms of the roles these characters play for Harry, so now, finally, let’s look at Snape.
Harry/Snape.
Harry’s relationship with Severus Snape is a complex, tumultuous, and violent one, and to me, is the most fascinating and the most enigmatic in the entire series. Again, the tone for all of their subsequent interactions was set up at their very first meeting. Snape has secret knowledge, and he made it clear from the first Potions class in Harry’s first year at Hogwarts that it was available only to a select few. And he makes it painfully clear that he doesn’t think Harry will be one of them. This is like a prophecy that finally gets fulfilled in OotP, when Harry repeatedly fails at his lessons in Occlumency with Snape. This also helps to explain the mystery of why so much time and page space was spent on these lessons—they represented Harry’s failure of knowledge where Snape was concerned. In OotP, Harry learns about his father’s moral failings through Snape, and blames Snape for goading Sirius to his death. In HBP, Harry learns that Snape was his parent’s betrayer, and he sees Snape kill Dumbledore. In other words, Harry now blames Snape for the loss of all three of his father figures (and his mother as well.) He actually expresses more literal hatred for Snape than for Voldemort. He even hates himself, I think, for unwittingly getting so much tainted/dark knowledge from Snape through the HBP potions book. For him, the mere idea of getting either love or knowledge through Snape now is anathema.
So, we’ve analyzed Harry’s relationships, and through this, we’ve seen how agape love is presented as being the only kind that is at all likely to defeat Voldemort. We’ve also looked a little at how Harry searches out, receives, and disseminates knowledge—and how he refuses to do so through some relationships in his life. How does all of this come together in order to predict what might happen in Book 7—and what about Snape? This part is speculative, I will warn y’all, and it gets more so as it goes on. It all begins with this quote from an interview that J.K. Rowling gave in 2000 about her religious beliefs:
''Yes, I am [a Christian],'' she says. ''Which seems to offend the religious right far worse than if I said I thought there was no God. Every time I've been asked if I believe in God, I've said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what's coming in the books.'' (Rowling, J.K. Interview with Geordie Greig. Tatler Magazine)
This quote is generally overlooked—but this is a mistake, since I believe that by analyzing it, we can find the ending of the series. So let’s look at how this is done.
At first, I looked for the answer on the most obvious level, which I do think is what J.K. Rowling is literally talking about here, given that she said any intelligent reader could guess it. Both Snape and Voldemort are Harry’s enemies; in fact, at the end of HBP, Harry was expressing more actual hatred towards Snape. So the love that Harry will have to find within himself in Book 7-- and the love that will be so very difficult to find-- will be the central tenet of Christianity, the ultimate agape: love for his enemy. He'll have to forgive and love his two traditional human enemies in this series: Snape and Draco, but Snape will be a whole lot harder and more significant. Every other task Harry has accomplished will seem easy, next to that. All of the other types of love (point to board) have only led up to this.
Some, such as Lynne Milum, have believed that ”Harry’s potential to redeem Voldemort would be the greatest victory of all.” (Milum) So in this paradigm, Harry’s forgiveness would have to be directed towards Voldemort rather than towards Snape and Draco, and that would be his redeeming power of love. There are a couple of problems with this, though.
Perhaps Harry really does have to accept the idea that Voldemort is his shadow self, and I think this was hinted at very extensively in OOtP. But the way that the young Tom Riddle is portrayed in HBP makes this particular interpretation very hard to really believe. We don’t see Tom shown with all the little ambiguities and grey areas that Draco Malfoy had in the first five books, for instance. Tom is an unrelievedly bad seed from the very beginning, from torturing fellow schoolmates to killing bunny rabbits to poisoning witches to murdering his uncle.
An even bigger issue, however, is that actual forgiveness is far more likely to happen between Harry and Snape (and also Draco,) because as normal human beings, Snape and Draco can accept it and Voldemort cannot. Also, in keeping with the traditions of a hero’s journey narrative like Tam Lin, I think that all of Harry’s friends and mentors must be stripped away near the end, at least temporarily. In this case, his relationship with his greatest human enemy, Snape, is then the only key to salvation. The key here is that the way his hatred for Snape is described in HBP and the way he felt Voldemort’s hatred in himself in OotP are the same. Harry has to reject hatred in himself,-- his negative feelings towards Snape and also Draco have been a huge theme in this books, he has to overcome them, I also think that The Atonement with the Father—comes in Book 7, whether it’s with James, Sirius, or Dumbledore, or maybe all three, and I think they’re going to give him the final strength he needs to do this.
However, I also believe that this is not quite the entire story. Now, as most of you probably know, there is a theory that Dumbledore got Snape to agree to kill him during the school year. Dumbledore knew that he was going to die anyway, and he wanted to keep Draco from becoming a murderer. Because Harry had already failed to master Occlumency, he could not be told about this plan. This is a fascinating idea, and I think it’s true, but… I think there’s a very specific hero’s journey narrative that JKR had in mind as a model for this, and it helps us understand exactly how it might play out.
+++
Thanks to all the reviewers! :)
There's one part of the essay left, and then there's the extra D/G info, which wasn't included in the presentation. I might tack that onto the end of the essay, or it might have its own section-- depends on exactly how long it turns out to be.
The next chapter of KC is done!! Y'all know that I like to wait until I have a few, though. But it's a nice one... :)
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