Finishing a good book series invariably leaves a void in your chest—like a world suddenly ceasing to exist. With Harry Potter, the emptiness is especially acute. Fortunately, I’ve had the pleasure of descending back into that void several times over the course of my life and revisiting the stories of Harry, Ron, and Hermione for as long as the story lasts.
This post isn’t proper literary criticism, but rather a collection of thoughts that stuck out to me on this last reading: (1) the theme of death, (2) the characters, particularly Snape, and (3) the immersive atmosphere. Me being me, here’s some words about each of them.
(This goes without saying, but: major spoiler warning for a 15-year-old book series ahead.)
The Secrets of Death
“I know nothing of the secrets of death, Harry, for I chose my feeble imitation of life instead.”
—Nearly Headless Nick, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
If the thousands of pages in the Harry Potter series can be boiled down to a single theme and thesis, it would be attitude toward death. Death is a visible reality throughout the series, from Voldemort’s attempt at immortality through the Philosopher’s Stone in the first book and Harry’s encounter with Voldemort’s immortal memory in the second book to the deaths of people in Harry’s life that introduce Harry himself to death (his parents before the series begins; Cedric in the fourth book; Sirius in the fifth; Dumbledore in the sixth; and Hedwig, Moody, Dobby, Fred, Lupin, Tonks, and others in the seventh). Rowling’s claim is that death is a fact of life, and it is far from the worst thing in life.
The difference between Voldemort and Dumbledore is that Dumbledore has the proper attitude towards death, while Voldemort does not. Dumbledore does not fear death; Voldemort does, and this is why Dumbledore is the only wizard Voldemort fears. Voldemort is able to twist the aptly-named ‘Death Eaters’ to do his bidding because they fear death more than living an immoral life. Dumbledore sacrifices his own life to eventually destroy Voldemort, while Voldemort commits murder to protect his own life. Dumbledore destroys the Philosopher’s Stone; Voldemort covets it.
“You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying…”
—Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
And Harry becomes master of Death precisely because he is willing to die. He is not the first or second brothers in Bard’s book, seeking to conquer Death and becoming victims themselves, just like Voldemort. He is the third brother, wielder of the Cloak, willing to live a life worth living and then greeting Death as a friend. “The Boy Who Lived” in the first chapter becomes a man who died, and then chose to live again, in the final chapters. When Harry calls Tom Riddle by his real name in their final duel, it’s a reminder that Tom was always just a mortal, and that the unstoppable, immortal wizard Voldemort was always just a myth. Harry never needed a persona, even though he was the one who truly conquered death. In the end, Harry completes a seven-book journey from fearing death—seeking out a magical mirror to stare at his dead parents—to accepting it, and giving up the Hallows.
“‘The last enemy that shall be defeated is death’…” A horrible thought came to him, and with a kind of panic. “Isn't that a Death Eater idea? Why is that there?”
“It doesn't mean defeating death in the way the Death Eaters mean it, Harry,” said Hermione, her voice gentle. “It means… you know… living beyond death. Living after death.”
—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
In this regard, Rowling’s work can be seen as dialoguing with figures like internet educator CGP Grey, who argues against acceptance of death, citing technological advances. For those who are persuaded by Rowling’s compelling presentation of the costs of fearing death, Harry Potter is an antidote to that fear.
“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love.”
—Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Tangentially, I also find interesting the way Rowling treats esoteric concepts such as love, time, memory, and death as concrete, even physical realities to be studied and trusted. These are all ideas under study at the Department of Mysteries, and they all interact with magic just as the physical world does. To me, these reveal the seriousness with which Rowling is willing to take the metaphysical, beneath all the whimsical magic of Summoning Charms and Bat-Bogey Hexes.
Snape, Dumbledore, and Other Flawed Adults
My friend Mia and I argue like Gryffindors and Slytherins about Snape. I’ve always been a Snape fanboy (I got that from my mother). Mia despised him. Not long after I moved back to the United States, she continued the argument with a 700-word email called “The Snape Argument” that sat in my inbox for a year. So here’s—finally—my reply.
Snape isn’t a nice person. He’s needlessly cruel to Harry, Ron, Hermione, and the other Gryffindors, and this is a fact of how he chooses to act. (Though, proper educational procedures in Hogwarts would have gone a long way toward fixing this problem. Could Dumbledore or McGonagall not have spared a single class period to observe Snape’s class to see how he ran it?)
Nonetheless, Snape saves Harry’s life on at least three occasions (countercursing Quirrell in the first book, rallying the Order of the Phoenix in the fifth, and helping Ron find him in the seventh). He loves Harry while hating him, which, oddly enough, is how Snape feels about his own self. He went down the darkest of paths. But when it killed what he valued the most, he changed. Sometimes that’s what it takes to cause a person to change. If Voldemort had never gone after the Potters, Snape would have remained a Death Eater. Ultimately, he never became a kind or a fair person, but he did become willing to make great personal sacrifices to help Dumbledore bring about Voldemort’s downfall.
The big revelation of Snape’s love for Lily and true loyalty to Dumbledore comes after Snape has died. This isn’t the time to judge whether Snape is a “good” character or “bad” character, narratively. It’s too late for that, and he isn’t written to be a “good” character. He’s written to be a character that the reader can choose to forgive, or not to forgive, once they hear his full story. To me, he isn’t good, but he is forgivable. He knows better than anyone the pain that following Voldemort can cause, and he tries his best to remedy his mistakes, even knowing that no amount of sacrifice he makes will bring back the woman he cared for, his best childhood friend.
Rowling has a grasp on what people are really like, a fact that is evident in a whole slew of flawed and layered characters. Dumbledore is another such character, and one who’s easier than Snape to like and to forgive for his past mistakes. It’s interesting that neither Elphias Doge’s blind loyalty nor Rita Skeeter’s vitriolic attacks turn out to be fully factual. The older Dumbledore himself would be the first one to admit that his actions as a youth—sacrificing his family relationships and fraternizing with Grindelwald to plan world domination for the greater good—did not live up to the ideals he would later espouse. It might have taken getting his nose broken by his brother and losing his family for him to change, but he did change. (Even if, at times, he continued to be tempted by promises of his reunited family, such as the Resurrection Stone and the Mirror of Erised. In light of the earlier discussion of death, this weakness of Dumbledore’s is perhaps the reason why Harry was needed to defeat Voldemort, with Dumbledore as mentor rather than hero, in a literary sense.)
As for Dumbledore’s relationship with Harry, everything, including his keeping secrets from Harry, was motivated by his compassion for Harry and his desire to give Harry as much of a childhood as he could. Having Harry grow up with the Dursleys was the only option for preventing him from being murdered by Voldemort sympathizers at any time (admittedly this is something of a plot contrivance), and can hardly be considered Dumbledore’s fault.
“I cared about you too much,” said Dumbledore simply. “I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act…
“My only defense is this: I have watched you struggling under more burdens than any student who has ever passed through this school, and I could not bring myself to add another—the greatest one of all.”
—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Even the characters closest to Harry are some of the most flawed. Ron is often bitter and jealous; Hermione can be judgmental and narrow-minded. Sirius’ poor treatment of a house-elf ultimately results in his death, and his first act after escaping from prison was attempted murder (both were perhaps justifiable actions under an ethic of retribution, yet both led to further tragedy). And don’t get me started on James. (He definitely married up.) Obviously these characters are nice to Harry, but “if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?” Or in Sirius’ own words, “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
Harry’s World
Before I wrap up my thoughts, opinions, and ramblings, I want to mention a couple of devices that contribute to the feeling of immersion in Harry’s world. One is initiation and de-initiation. In anthropology and architecture, there’s this idea of the archway as an entrance into another place or state of existence. For example, holy places may have archways that separate the mundane from the sacred. Think of those iconic red-orange torii gates outside Shinto shrines.
For Harry, the initiation and de-initiation comes from him starting and ending each story in a mundane place that could exist in the reader’s universe—the Dursleys’ house—and then being yeeted into the magical world. This is exactly what happens to the reader when they pick up a Harry Potter book: they are lifted from the mundane to the fantastical, and then return to the mundane when they put the book down. By providing a proper archway into Harry’s world, Rowling heightens the proximity of her magic to the reader’s everyday experience.
Another device of immersion is Rowling’s use of letters, signs, and other artifacts scattered throughout the text. I don’t see these often in other books I read. When Harry gets a letter from Hogwarts, the reader can see exactly what that letter looks like. When Hagrid sends Harry a note about Buckbeak, the reader can see that, too, complete with distinct handwriting and smudged ink. The same goes for the wizarding exam grading scale, the sign at a hospital that lists departments and floors, the signatures on owl post, and dozens of other tangible items. They work as a sort of first-person window through the eyes of the characters.
Rowling’s style of dialogue also follows the contours of real dialogue more organically than other authors I’ve read; she regularly uses fragments of trailing or interrupted speech, and she doesn’t shy away from using ALL CAPS to heighten the volume of a scene when necessary. These textual features, combined with Rowling’s intentional portrayals of everyday events such as going to class, doing homework, commuting to work, getting mail, and eating meals, make the Harry Potter books some of the most realistic-feeling books I’ve read, despite the obvious fantastical elements.
Harry Potter’s fictional world is one in which countless people have found solace and escape, myself included. Perhaps this is strange, since her world is far from without difficulty, death and suffering. In some ways, it feels much like our own, full of complex personalities and relatable conversations. Yet the true magic of Harry Potter is that this is a world where the afterlife is just on the other side of a train ride from London and where evil is conquered by sacrifice, friendship, and above all, love.
“There is a room in the Department of Mysteries,” interrupted Dumbledore, “that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that reside there. It is the power held within that room that you possess in such quantities and which Voldemort has not at all. That power took you to save Sirius tonight. That power also saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests. In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.”
—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Mischief managed. ∎