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[elanor-x.livejournal.com]

I really like this chapter, but during this reread it seemed like a giant plot hole+ IITS to me. Since it was too long to add as a comment to sistermagpie: 

Chapter 26: The Cave.
 

* Ironically the first sentence with its' descriptions of 'rushing waves', 'a light, chilly breeze' and finally 'moonlit sea and star-strewn sky' made me think about extreme and grand, even somewhat idyllic natural beauty.

 

* JKR doesn't waste time and tries to subtly impress D's uniqueness upon her readers from literally his first sentence. D asks H's opinion about the place as if "whether it was a good site for a picnic". Unfortunately, since the story is told from H's viewpoint it comes out as the first subtle hint to H's fear in this chapter. How else was D supposed to ask that? With voice trembling from fear /apparently like H inside/?

 

* How did Riddle manage this incredibly steep climb with 2 (!) small children, without a wand? D's "magic would have served better than ropes" isn't an answer. Did he levitate them, like that rabbit to the rafters, or somehow magically tied them to him? He must have some powers, all right.   

 

* Now to add a little more 'suspense' Rowling makes our heroes face 'a treacherous descent' from wet rocks, followed by a swim in 'icy' water, completely defying all laws of logic in their way. Can't D just apparate them another 5 meters and save me from reading this boring part? It would only be logical, if V put anti-apparition spells there, but then it would have to be referenced in the text. That's the biggest trouble with introducing such concepts as time travel, super-powerful heroes, magic or even very advanced technology in the story- in a somewhat paradoxical way a writer has to undermine or at least limit them /forgetting like here obviously isn't an option/ to make the story interesting, when they were added to make it so in the first place.

 

* In an almost comical way Harry retreats into a fantasy world, where his shivers from icy water are, in fact, a sign of the inborn ability to have ''the same [like D, hahaha!] awareness of enchantments'' and not of his inability to apply a simple first-year-level warming spell. Come back to reality, Harry!  

 

* D's working things out 'simply by looking and touching', murmuring words in a strange [for Harry] tongue made me really curious. Can such wizards like McGonagall, Snape or Flitwick do such things too? Can Aurors do that [f.e. Scrimgeour]? May be if he taught Harry such things too, the lessons would be both more interesting and beneficial. In addition, we would be able to compare D's & Snape's teaching styles. D had been a Transfigation teacher, who taught V, so to actually see D teaching somebody something for the first time in the series would be very interesting indeed. And no, giving cryptic old-wise-mentor advice and witticisms doesn't count. Later Harry doesn't realize that calling 'fire and warmth' to their aid means just using fire until D explains it 'with a smile'. Was his style of teaching using 'beautiful' speech spiked with alliterations, allusions, figures of speech and whatnot instead of explaining in simple, acceptable to every student way or has he forgotten how to teach in his old age from the lack of practice and treats Harry as if they were the same age? I would love to see a flashback, featuring D teaching Tom a new skill at a typical Transfigation lesson /& not designed to make Tom seem bestial/.

 

* May be some reviewers would snark at D sounding ''disdainful, even disappointed, as though V had fallen short of the standards D expected''  [at blood demanding door] and claim it is Rowling's nice excuse for not coming with more original ideas than this door & dead people in water, but it wonderfully works for me here. Even if similar obstacles appear in LoTR and probably numerous other stories / I am not a fan of fantasy in general and read only HP and LoTR in this genre, but if the idea appears in both books, it probably indicates smth /, clichés became clichés since they were good ideas from the beginning, but unfortunately just got overused by bad, unimaginative authors unable to add their own flavor to the good, old recipe [& here I ended writing a cliché myself! It's that easy. Yay!].

 

* D tells that V fails to grasp that there are much worse things than physical injury. Err… depends what injury. Some people prefer quick death to living paralyzed or slowly, painfully dying for years. I understand that it isn't D's point, but can't grasp what he exactly means. What would D do in V's place to guard the entry? Mental injury? Or just say a secret word and enter?

A question presents itself: would V have to draw his own blood to enter? May be, but I slightly doubt it. There has to be another way. Couldn't D transfigure a rock into a pig & take its' blood instead? How would the door differentiate between human & animal's blood? I am lost choosing among IdiotWorld, IITS and PlotHole or Me-The-Idiot-Reader /for tearing the fantasy book to pieces so much that it starts to seem utter rubbish/. 

 

* JKR continues building the atmosphere of doom up until it can be cut with a knife: a great black lake is too vast to see the distant banks, a cavern is so high that the ceiling is out of sight, the lake water is completely still & the darkness is somehow denser than normal darkness.

Here, I have a logical explanation: the darkness is really denser than normal, since they are in a great stone tomb –the door is closed, so there is no light at all, which normally doesn't happen outside due to sun, moon and stars. In such conditions there is no wonder Harry can't see the ceiling or the distant banks & of cause the lake water is still. I would be more worried, if it was moving without reason, as Harry will be soon.

The description looks like a good, subtle way to show Harry's fear though.

 

* People usually snark at absurdity of H's: "Professor? Do you think the Horcrux is here?", but the text makes clear that H asks it out of fear, wanting to break the 'oppressive, unnerving' silence by something.

 

*Don't people find H's (justified, to be fair) fear a bit strange, considering his remarkable past feats like in CoS? After all, he is with D, V isn't present, not even aware of the Inferi yet & in a way they are just searching for an object.

Also, in H's mind "I am not afraid with D" apparently subconsciously means "D will take care of everything himself, while I enjoy the show". Watch out for his surprise when D offers him try a Summoning Charm, after H's question: "We couldn't… we couldn't just try a Summoning Charm?". Heh, H's "we" clearly = "D doing+ me watching" here.

H's casting Accio (!) is described as quite a mean feat imo:

"Harry had not expected this, but cleared his throat and said loudly, wand aloft, 'Accio Horcrux!' "

See how brave Harry is when dealing with the unexpected, preparing himself to say the spell in a nice, loud way ?/may be I exaggerate, but my fear, that we are supposed to perceive it this way, is sadly practically unshakeable at this point/

This nice illusion is quickly destroyed though, when H leaps backwards 'in shock', hitting the wall with 'sundering' heart after seeing 'something very large and pale' erupting out of the water 20 feet(≈6.1

?metres) away. Why exactly is H shocked? Did he expect this come flying to his hands 

 

Of cause, in V's place if I put some monsters in the lake, I wouldn't want my enemies to know about their existence at all, let alone being able to trivially identify their nature before coming into water, thus destroying the crucial element of surprise, but at least V is constantly characterized as making convenient oversights, like forgetting healing powers of Phoenix tears in CoS.

 

* And here I can't refrain from typing a quick sequence of 3[!], using Mike Smith's term, Super- Dumbass- 3 moments:

 

(1) H: 'Did you think that would happen, sir?'

D: 'I thought something would happen if we made an obvious attempt to get our hands on the Horcrux.'

 

(2) H: 'But we don't know what the thing was'.

D: 'What the things are, you mean'.

 

(3)H: 'You don't think the Horcrux is at the bottom?'

D: 'Oh no… I think the Horcrux is in the middle.'

 

Similar dialogue takes approximately quarter of this chapter. Those sentences specially caught my attention since they come in one of the most exciting parts, in quick succession and the words above are marked out by JKR herself. Harry gives D quite a hard time here. May be it helped D understand better the kind of difficulties Snape faced at the infamous Occlumensy lessons /except for hating Harry & James/. After all, D had never had to deal incessantly with H's lack of understanding prior to this year.

 

* Based on this evidence of H's great intellect & the way it seems to be paralyzed by fear /watch (3)- completely ignoring the green light/  D shouldn't worry a bit about H agreeing to follow such orders as 'run', 'hide' or 'go back', since he can't do it to literally save his life anyway, as will indeed be proved very soon.

 

* I love how H can't shake off the vision of tentacles rising out of the dark water when they'll deal with smth much more frightening, imo.

 

* H: 'There are bodies in here!' [in 'high', 'unlike his own' voice]

D: 'Yes, but we do not need to worry about them at the moment.' ['placidly']

H: 'At the moment?' ['tearing his gaze from the water'- the verb indicates difficulty in stopping gazing?]

 

Heh. Personally, I would hate to go on a mission with D. Snape seems a much better partner: not talking in riddles, giving necessary information in straight reporting & presumably warning of danger in advance .

 

Also, only after rereading I understood why I liked this part of the dialogue so much: it's classically comedian piece. H's fear contrasts with D's placidity in a somewhat black or even gallows humorous way.

 

Note one very interesting and telling /sadly I am not sure what exactly/ moment. D didn't warn H of the Inferi until he saw them himself, despite assuming that after taking the Horcrux the dead would become 'less peaceable' & H's incessant questioning on the subject. Why did he let H see them without prior warning? In the beginning, I considered D not wanting to completely destroy H's confidence, but afterwards I realized that in this case the right thing to do would be tell him the truth about the situation with his 'nothing to be feared from a body' reasoning, as soon as D recognized what 'the things in the water' are & prepare H mentally to the possible future confrontation [I bet D identified the Inferi straight away when H made one of them erupt out of the water]. May be he intended telling H after crossing the lake or being excited about the Horcrux forgot about the matter altogether, wisely not paying too much attention to Harry's stupid questions, I am not sure. You decide.

 

* D's "It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more." comes out as a shallow platitude to me. Hopefully without sparking religious discussion, I know some not religious people, who think that the moment their heart/brain stop working, they will just cease to exist, like sleeping forever without dreams. So in their case it's not the fear of the unknown, but the human difficulty to imagine a peace  of rotting meat /not to be insensitive, I lost close relatives myself, but I just can't truthfully describe a dead body otherwise/ left from all one's ambitions, desires, dreams, hopes…in short, life. For them it's like knowing you are doomed from birth, never thinking about it too much & suddenly get the abrupt, cruel reminder, starring in their faces, impossible to ignore.

 

* Now the light+warmth=fire code, which was mentioned above. I wanted to write that conversing cryptically is so natural for D that he can't stop himself even in face of mortal danger, but now… well, it really isn't that cryptic at all /except for people with H's brain power, of cause/.

 

* Swimming across the black lake H  'couldn't pretend, now, that he was not scared.' Funny, since imo he had already demonstrated his fear in a variety of ways from asking stupid (even for him) questions to leaping backwards in shock and hitting the wall after the body's jump.

 

* 'Out of the way, please, Harry', said D. [when they were standing near the basin]

Why didn't D bring Snape to this mission, if he really utterly trusts him?  Snape helped him survive after destroying the ring [but still doesn't know about the Horcruxes?], is DA expert & would be much better helper than Harry was here, f.e. wouldn't forget to use fire against the Inferi thus forcing D to use his last powers fighting them all by himself.

D had to choose H to show him how to destroy a Horcrux because of plot purposes, but he overestimated his and H's powers ['The protection was… after all… well designed.' Anyone?]. It seems that D died from his hubris- a common fatal flaw in ancient tragedies.

 

* D: 'I can only conclude that this potion is supposed to be drunk'.

H: 'What? No!'

D: 'Yes, I think so: only by drinking it can I empty the basin…'

 

Classic IITS +Idiot World.

Why not get out of the cave and bring Dobby/Kreature/some animal or even another person (if using the animal doesn't work out) to empty the basin? I don't think D intended to die after drinking, so it wouldn't be entirely V-esque to do that. This person would get all possible help afterwards and let's face the reality: prophecies aside, D's life seems even more precious than Harry's for the war effort to me. Army commanders and prime ministers normally don't endanger their lives, participating in the battles themselves. Not nowadays, and I doubt they did it in the past either- somebody has to command the troops, you know.

 

But then we wouldn't witness D's tragic sliding down the wall in the next chapter & the-old-mentor-has-to-die, and I am not a literature expert, so… Ironically, I suspect JKR ended up creating somebody to step in D's place to save the day, since Harry and his friends are hopeless alone:

         >>JK: “Dumbledore's family would be a profitable line of inquiry.”

/So, we killed the old mentor to keep the tradition up. Now it's high time to choose another person from the same family to fill the void.Yay!/
Also:    >>In Book 7 we will become better acquainted with another member of the Order of the Phoenix. This is someone we know about but have not "met properly."

/D's brother probably?/    

 

* D thinks that V would want to keep the person alive long enough to find out their motives, but it isn't realistic. How would V know that somebody penetrated his defenses to begin with? Does he visit the Horcruxes' locations from time to time or know when they are in danger? If the answer was positive, he would already be aware of the ring's destruction, which doesn't seem to be true. Also, how long would this person stay alive? The most likely scenario is that after drinking this potion the intruder would try drinking the lake's water & consequently join the Inferi's army, without V being any wiser that somebody entered the cave at all, btw. Yet another flaw in V's 'perfect' plan.

 

* People in fandom speculated at length about the nature of D's potion caused visions.

D: "It's all my fault,… please make it stop, I know I did wrong, oh, please make it stop and I'll never, never again"

 

 I just can't imagine D begging like that, even if he would relive the worst experiences of his life or grasp the full cost of his mistakes. Those words resemble more the pleas for mercy of V's victims, tortured probably at the same place. Interesting what exactly they begged to stop & what they initially did to attract such wrath. Judging by Billy Stubbs's rabbit's fate due to the previous day's argument with Tom, probably not too much.   

      

* Harry would be dead, if D didn't awake in time- looks well for H in the last book. Interesting what would D do, if H died & he escaped unscathed. Would he give up all hope to defeat V [unlikely] or continue fighting & destroying the Horcruxes, probably sharing the secret with another person to continue the task even if he dies? Realistically Snape would have much better chance to destroy the Horcruxes than Harry.

 

* On one of the covers H&D are shown with both of their wands creating the ring of fire. See this link, f.e..

However, a careful reading reveals that D created & maintained it alone, saving H's life, whose only deed in this cave after the Inferi's appearance was to help fire-maintaining D back to the boat. Funny, isn't it?

Comments

[ellecain.livejournal.com]

Funny, since imo he had already demonstrated his fear in a variety of ways from asking stupid (even for him) questions to leaping backwards in shock and hitting the wall after the body's jump

You mean the same way Draco showed his fear in PS/SS when asked to go into the Forest with Hagrid and the others? Harry wouldn't do that, he's Our Brave Hero. And no way would he lose his head when confronted with a frightening vision like Draco was then! Oh wait.....