“But where will you go if you don’t come back to school?”
“I thought I might go back to Godric’s Hollow,” Harry muttered. (Half-Blood Prince 651)
And it’s about time, Harry. As Harry learned all about Voldemort’s history in his private lessons with Dumbledore, an incredible difference between Harry and Voldemort became apparent: Voldemort’s desire to find out about his family history was extreme, even obsessive. Before he had even “come of age,” he had managed to return to the Gaunt house and “take care of business,” so to speak.
Harry, on the other hand, has not asked enough questions, plainly put. We’ve endured 6 years now of Harry hearing this or that about his parents, but mostly wanting to believe certain things about them without asking a lot of questions.
And this is one of the illustrations that leads us to an explanation of the concept of “Narrative Misdirection,” which I began writing about here. Rowling employs the “third person, limited omniscient” view in her writing. In other words, for the most part, we see, hear, and feel things as Harry experiences them, and from Harry’s point of view. In fact, if you’re like I am, the first two chapters of Half-Blood Prince felt almost out of place, because we weren’t hearing anything from Harry’s point of view. Even the opening story of Goblet of Fire with Frank Bryce turned out to be Harry’s dream.
Rowling has trained us to sympathize with Harry and everything he goes through. The “third person” part of the technique simply means we’re hearing it from a “he, she, it, they” point of view rather than “I, We,” etc. “Limited omniscient” simply means that we’re getting a huge amount of story, but we’re not getting everything; in fact, we can’t possibly get everything, but we’re made to feel as though we do know everything there is to know, because of the way we feel what Harry feels. The “limited” part, in most of the story, is limited to Harry’s perception of things.
Hence, because Harry has not asked very many questions, neither have we. And even if we have thought to ask them, there’s no one there to answer them, because we only hear answers to the questions Harry has asked.
So by causing us to love Harry, Rowling has simultaneous confused us all into not knowing what’s coming next, even though we have 6 books of material to look through.
Tricky, isn’t she?
Jonathan on 
korg20000bc on 
Arabella Figg on 
revgeorge on 
Red Rocker on 
Dave the Longwinded on 
Fricka on 
Loading ...
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
remember though, this is one of the first lessons that harry was taught by aunt petunia – “don’t ask questions”.
he learnt not to ask. he learnt to not trust the adults in his life. so even though he has this great affection for, and even trust in dumbledore, and sirius and the weasleys it often doesn’t occur to him to actually go and ask.
i think that is very clever of jkr to build that into his character as it serves the way the story unfolds.
it’s one thing in HBP i was frustrated on his behalf. he was finally bringing his concerns to the adults and wasn’t acknowledged enough for how big a step this was for him, and then those concerns were pretty much dismissed out of hand (from his point of view anyway)confirming the idea that he had to take matters into his own hands.
such a great layer to the telling of the story imo.
cheers,
jo
Jo, excellent points. It was frustrating to watch everyone kind of shaking off Harry’s questions and theories. But, after all, we’ve all learned by this point that when Harry gets a theory about something, it’s probably wrong. So it makes sense. I think it was another way that JKR fooled us all – Harry’s theory about Malfoy was right! (Except that we don’t yet know whether or not he’s actually a Death Eater).
Wondering if you can help me out….Dumbledore has stated on a few occasions that Harry must go back to Privet Drive for Harrys protection. Now is this protection as in something similar to a secret keeper (as in Vol. can’t find him at Privet Drive so he is safe while he is there) or is this to do with the protection that his mother has passed on to him? or something compleatly different? If it is the magic that is prtecting him that passed on from his mother why would it run out when he becomes of age?