On Integrity and Transcendence-

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

This is going to be a whole lot shorter than that title would suggest. It's really just a question, brought about by Sunnyskywalker's post below on the meaning of the prophecy. Here goes--

Many of us were disturbed by the flayed child in Harry's visit to the afterlife--or whatever that train station was. You remember, he at first felt compassion for the child, and then ignored it. And didn't Dumbledore say the child was Voldemort? Or, to be precise, Voldemort's soul fragment?

But we know Dumbledore is not always truthful, and we know he is not truly wise. So who is the flayed child? Where did it come from?

Clearly, it is the part of Voldemort's soul that resided in Harry for seventeen years. That child is Harry, not Voldemort. Oh, I know: J.K. Rowling would like us to think the soul fragment has nothing to do with Harry. In her story world, everything about Harry that was at all like Voldemort--his vengeful feelings, his rages, his self-absorption, his parseltongue, heck, perhaps even his magical ability--came from the soul fragment and Harry is a completely separate individual. But I can't believe that.

I can't believe it because Harry is actually written as a fairly consistent character. He  IS vengeful and self-absorbed, understandably so at first, and he becomes more so as the series progresses. I am not going to give him a free pass on his behavior in books six and seven, for example, and just say: "Oh, that was Voldemort. It wasn't really Harry." That's not how emotion works. We all have negative feelings and impulses. We can deny them, but that's not healthy, is it? Rather than rejecting our worse impulses and negative feelings, we can try to turn that energy around. We can try to transcend the negative aspects and use them for good. But we can only do this if we first recognize and accept those feelings and impulses.

So what I think is that, in that train station, Dumbledore teaches Harry to reject a part of himself. It's a dreadful thing to do. It is bound to limit Harry's moral and spiritual development. What do you think?

Comments

[aikaterini.livejournal.com]

/I was also fond of the original (pre-HBP) Changeling Hypothesis on Red Hen, which asked what hanging out in Harry's head might do to Voldemort's soul. However bad things got for Harry, it was better than Voldemort--so couldn't essentially being given a childhood do-over have given Voldemort a chance at redemption? (Maybe not a good chance, but more than he had the first time around.) Could that flayed fragment have been healed enough that it could feel remorse and pull the main fragment back to it? That still wouldn't leave Voldemort with a whole soul, but again, he'd at least be less damaged than before./

That's a very interesting idea! If the soul fragment in Harry had learned compassion through Harry, if Harry had influenced it positively all the while Voldemort was trying to corrupt him, that could've been an interesting dynamic.

But with the way that Harry has been characterized in canon, I'm not sure if the soul fragment would have much to learn from Harry. Like I commented in an earlier post about DH, Harry doesn't come across as the compassionate opposite of Voldemort, just somebody who's not as bad as him (which is really not a high bar). For all that love is touted as the force that Voldemort doesn't understand, Harry doesn't come across as especially loving, especially not to people that he dislikes. What, for example, would the soul fragment learn from Harry's hatred of Snape, from Harry's determination to think the worst of him and to blame him for everything that goes wrong?

/It makes "all was well" so hard to believe, even after a 19-year jump./

For all that people, including myself, are happy to forget and dismiss "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" as non-canon, Harry's characterization in that play really drives your point home. Because it's years later, Voldemort is gone, there are no more Horcruxes, Harry is surrounded by family and friends who love him, and yet Harry still behaves terribly to his son and acts like a child. Which makes it all the more convincing that the Horcrux excuse was just that: an excuse.

[sunnyskywalker]

Yeah, Rowling definitely didn't take Harry in a direction where that would work. Which would have been okay if the direction she did take weren't so depressing and unsatisfying.

Harry as a lousy father is one of the things that sounded most plausible about that play. Sad, but plausible. It's so weird how Rowling can show things that make sense and only later go back and try to explain it differently.