Another guest post by revgeorge!
Glad to be back with another post on HBP. Sorry I’ll have to briefly touch on many points.
The Trio plus One is enjoying an interlude of calm and happiness. Harry is blissfully happy with Ginny. Even Ron and Hermione are happy and laughing for once. But there are still hints of gloom. Ginny mentions three Dementor attacks. The war is still going on despite the relative insulation the students enjoy at Hogwarts. Do you think Rowling succeeds in showing us the intensity of the war raging outside through only snippets of information breaking into the pretty much routine life of Hogwarts? After all, even though Voldemort’s back and war is on, this school year for Harry is pretty much the same as usual. Any thoughts? [click to continue…]
Our next guest post comes from Arabella Figg! ~ Travis
This is my first post here, and what a chapter to work on! So, no metaphorical Dung Bombs, please. (All page references are from the American edition.)
Sectumsempra could well have been titled Truth or Consequences, as deceit plays the starring role. Moreover, two events we’ve long-anticipated—a confrontation between Harry and Draco, and another kind between Harry and Ginny—occur.
The chapter begins with good news—Katie Bell’s return and the Ron/Lavender and Ginny/Dean breakups, Harry can now pursue Ginny, but fears Ron will disapprove; is he right (Ron has previously indicated how he would feel)? He returns Katie to the Quidditch team, displacing Dean who has played most of the year; was this fair? [click to continue…]
Chapter 23 (”Horcruxes”) is one of the most important chapters in the book with great implications for what happens thereafter, especially the last novel. The Felix Felicis potion is wearing off as Harry arrives at the portrait of the Fat Lady, but not before he finds out from Nearly Headless Nick that Dumbledore arrived at the school an hour ago. How lucky indeed! Harry arrives at Dumbledore’s office and now both of them can finally see the true, unaltered memory of Slughorn. A few observations:
1. Tom Riddle is wearing Marvolo’s ring so he already killed his father and paternal grandparents prior to the memory. Slughorn’s comments that he has “never been wrong about a student yet” is interesting because the reader knows that he is in fact wrong about Tom Riddle. Perhaps the main reason why Slughorn says this is because of Tom’s “careful flattery of the people who matter…” We know Slughorn has a weakness in this regard, but perhaps Slughorn shouldn’t be faulted for this. Many people, with the exception of Dumbledore, were taken in by the charming and talented Slytherin student.
2. The fact that Tom has the ring calls into question whether he really needed to know what a horcrux was. Despite what Slughorn says about the availability of horcrux books at Hogwarts, there is one book as we discover in the last novel, Secrets of the Darkest Art, which gives explicit instructions on making a horcrux. It is possible that Tom Riddle had access to that book before speaking to Slughorn. While horcruxes was banned as a subject at Hogwarts as of Professor Dippet’s reign as headmaster, there is no indication that any books on horcruxes were immediately taken out of the library, at least until Professor Dumbledore took over as headmaster. All the questions Tom asks Slughorn are building up to the information that he really seeks: can someone split their soul into two or more fragments. Such information would not be found in any book because it was never attempted.
3. Harry responds to Dumbledore’s comment that Harry has a power the Dark Lord never had with “I can love!” and almost saying “Big Deal!” Dumbledore picks up on this and says, “Yes, Harry, you can love…Which, given everything that has happened to you, is a great and remarkable thing. You are still too young to understand how unusual you are, Harry.” Harry’s reaction is not unusual because up to this point, he has heard constantly that love conquers all and that love will defeat Voldemort in the end. Harry sees Voldemort as stronger and does not yet see or understand that he can defeat Voldemort because of his self-sacrificial love in the end.
This leads us to the last part of the chapter and probably the most useful for discussion, namely what is the role of free will in the whole prophecy business. Dumbledore says that Harry is “setting too much store by the prophecy” before essentially saying that if Voldemort never killed Harry’s parents, would that have given Harry the desire for revenge. Of course not. It is because Voldemort killed his parents and is seeking to kill him that Harry will have to face the Dark Lord in the end. As long as Voldemort sets store in the prophecy, Harry will not rest until he defeats him. How can we understand Harry’s choice in light of the prophecy? Does Dumbledore answer the question sufficiently? How about Harry’s choice to go to Voldemort in the Forest and give up his life in light of his knowledge that this scenario has been planned already by Dumbledore? Is free will still involved?
Finally it is only fitting to close this post with the quote that closes the very chapter we are about to discuss:
But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew – and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents – that there was all the difference in the world.
Rowling and Bloomsbury Accused of Plagiarism
June 15, 2009A Yahoo! article indicates that a legal action filed in England is claiming that J.K. Rowling copied significant portions of Goblet of Fire from a 1987 children’s book written by Adrian Jacobs, called Willy the Wizard.
It named the estate’s trustee as Paul Allen, and said that Rowling had copied “substantial parts” of “The Adventures of [...]