“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” (Deathly Hallows 723)
This exchange is arguably the most important conversation in all 41,000 pages of the Harry Potter books. It takes place at the end of the final Harry Potter book, when Harry meets his (dead) mentor in a dream-like state following Voldemort’s second-to-last attempt to kill him. Harry presents Dumbledore with a binary choice, as if “real” and “happening inside my head” are mutually exclusive. As John Granger writes, “Dumbledore’s response reveals that he thinks Harry has created a false dichotomy. There is another option to account for his experience than just either/or…there is a nonmaterial (albeit, anything but immaterial) unity between what is real and what is happening in our heads” (Granger, Lectures 178, 179). Dumbledore casting aside Harry’s dichotomy, and replacing it with an option that offers the unification of opposites, is the most literal example of Rowling’s alternative to the dualism of the apocalyptic myth.
That alternative is evident throughout the series, though not always so explicitly spelled out. Rowling’s characters are carefully crafted so very few can be easily classified using a binary paradigm. On the surface, the “good guys” are a ragtag group, poster-children for diversity. Harry, the hero, was raised in the Muggle world and is a half-blood; his mother was a Muggle-born (a witch or wizard from a non-magical family). His best friend Ron’s family are Purebloods, but considered “the biggest blood-traitor family there is” for their acceptance of Muggles and Muggle-borns (Deathly Hallows 482). Harry’s other best friend, Hermione, despite being the “cleverest witch of [her] age” is a Muggle-born (Prisoner of Azkaban 253). Other members of the alliance include a half-giant, a werewolf, a Squib (someone from a magical family born without magic), and others who blur the lines between magical and non-magical or human and magical creature (Order of the Phoenix 173-174).
More significant than this superficial, visible diversity, however, is Rowling’s use of morally ambiguous characters to illustrate the grey area between good and evil. According to Elizabeth Rosen, morally ambiguous characters are one way in which the postmodern style manifests in an author’s adaptation of the apocalyptic narrative (14). Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black, fought against Voldemort and rejected his Pureblood family ‘s prejudices against Muggles. By a binary standard, that should make him good; he fights for the “right” cause. The way Rowling writes him, however, he is often excessively cruel to those he considers “other.” His extreme mistreatment of his house-elf (servant) ultimately led to a betrayal that cost him his life (OotP 831-332).
Ironically, earlier in the series, Sirius is the one who says to Harry, “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals” (Goblet of Fire 525). He talks the talk, but ultimately doesn’t walk the walk. By creating a character who fights with the good guys but shows the prejudice of the bad guys, Rowling challenges the reader (like Dumbledore challenges Harry) to accept a reality that can’t be explained by the apocalyptic, binary worldview. Other “good” guys include a spy in Voldemort’s inner circle, a thief/smuggler, and the owner of a bar that caters to a very shady clientele (OotP 173-174). Not exactly as innocent a group as the 144,000 virgins redeemed in the Book of Revelation (14:4).
It is Dumbledore himself, though, who presents the biggest challenge to a dualistic moral system. Rosen argues that authors of postmodern apocalyptic fiction translate the traditional deity figure into secular terms by humanizing the deity (xxiii). Some writers create more than one deity, splitting the traits of the traditional Judeo-Christian God among different characters (Rosen xxiii). Rowling, on the other hand, uses the same technique Rosen describes while analyzing the work of Alan Moore, that is, she “conflates the God/Devil binary structure of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm in order to represent a far more shaded morality than Revelation allows” (Rosen 8).
In the first four books of the series, Dumbledore is portrayed as powerful, infallible, and all-knowing. Harry (and therefore the readers, who get only his side of the story from the books’ third-person limited point of view) considers Dumbledore the greatest sorcerer in the world, whose “powers rival those of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named [Voldemort] at the height of his strength” (Chamber of Secrets 17). When Voldemort returns at the end of the fourth book, Harry expects Dumbledore to be the savior of the wizarding world, the only one who could possibly defeat Voldemort.
Throughout the fifth, six, and seventh books, however, this illusion is systematically destroyed as Harry loses faith in Dumbledore and learns about the more unsavory details of his past. In the fifth book, Harry blames Dumbledore for Sirius’s death, and Dumbledore admits to making “an old man’s mistakes…I had fallen into the trap I had foreseen, that I had told myself I could avoid, that I must avoid.” (OotP 838). Not only must Harry accept that Dumbledore’s plans were flawed, Harry realizes that it is, in fact, his task to defeat Voldemort. For the first time, Dumbledore is neither all-knowing nor all-powerful. In the sixth book, Harry watches Dumbledore die, leaving no doubt about his mentor’s mortality (Half-Blood Prince 595-596). The illusion of Dumbledore’s invincibility is shattered. After reading Dumbledore’s obituary, Harry admits to himself, “[h]e had thought he knew Dumbledore quite well, but ever since reading this obituary he had been forced to recognize that he had barely known him at all” (DH 21).
In the seventh book, Dumbledore takes on the qualities of a Devil or Antichrist figure. It is revealed that in his youth, Dumbledore was ambitious, power hungry, single-minded, and above all, committed to “cleansing” the world of Muggles and Muggle-borns – the very traits Voldemort is famous for (DH ch. 18). At first, Harry refuses to believe Dumbledore could be anything but “the embodiment of goodness and wisdom,” but eventually the evidence against Dumbledore is overwhelming (DH 360). Harry, seeing the world in terms of moral absolutes, begins to hate Dumbledore. Dumbledore’s fall from grace is complete; Harry’s feelings about him could not be farther away from the respect and adoration he felt in the first four books.
Hermione vainly attempts to convince Harry not to see Dumbledore as completely evil. She reminds him of the heroic Dumbledore they knew and tries to make Harry understand that “He changed, Harry, he changed! It’s as simple as that! Maybe he did those things when he was seventeen, but the whole of the rest of his life was devoted to fighting the Dark Arts!” (DH 361). Harry, however, can’t help but adamantly insist he’s been betrayed. According to his idea of moral, if Dumbledore wasn’t all good, he must have been all evil. Trapped in this all-or-nothing mentality, Harry takes it far too personally when Dumbledore’s immorality is revealed. He later wonders whether everything Dumbledore ever told him was a lie.
Rowling has a tendency to introduce characters as either good or evil, then gradually reveal over the course of the series how they actually embody some combination or middle ground between the two. For most of the series, however, Harry stubbornly refuses to recognize anything beyond the two extremes. He is devastated when he discovers his father, who he idolizes as a martyr and about whom he has never heard anything but praise, was a bully as a teenager. His feelings are described as “horrified and unhappy,” (OotP 650) and “as though the memory of it was eating him from inside” (OotP 653). He even goes so far as to wonder whether his father had forced his mother to marry him. He can’t accept the idea of his father as anything other than completely good or completely evil. “For nearly five years the thought of his father had been a source of comfort, of inspiration. Whenever someone had told him he was like James, he had glowed with pride inside. And now… now he felt cold and miserable at the thought of him” (OotP 653-654).
Harry feels similar anguish each time a character proves to be more than what he or she seems. After Sirius dies, and Dumbledore reveals his mistreatment of the house-elf as the cause, Harry is furious at Dumbledore for his implicit criticism of Sirius. “The rage that had subsided briefly flared in him again…He was on his feet again, furious, ready to fly at Dumbledore, who had plainly not understood Sirius at all, how brave he was, how much he had suffered…” (OotP 832). For Harry, Sirius’s sacrifice meant he could never have been anything but completely good. It’s impossible for Harry to reconcile Sirius’s good and bad traits; he can only see his godfather, like Dumbledore and his father, as one or the other.
Harry also fails to understand that not everyone shares this dualistic worldview. When Dumbledore talks about Sirius’s flaws, Harry immediately accuses him of implying Sirius’s death was only getting what he deserved. Dumbledore, of course, believes nothing of the sort. In fact, he is “ever on guard against letting his perception be clouded by labels, prejudicial stigmas, and pigeon holes” but he also knows Harry is not yet capable of accepting this type of non-binary morality (Granger, Keys 195) .
Of course, Harry’s apocalyptic sense of morality cuts both ways. It not only prevents his acceptance of bad traits in good characters, it blinds him to any redeeming characteristics in so-called “evil” characters. Harry hates his Muggle relatives, not without good reason. They neglected and abused him as a child, locked him in a cupboard under the stairs and forced him to do all the housework. The second Dumbledore starts to say something that could redeem his aunt, Harry interrupts, “’She doesn’t love me,’ said Harry at once. ‘She doesn’t give a damn – ‘ ‘But she took you,’ Dumbledore cut across him. ‘She may have taken you grudgingly, furiously, unwillingly, bitterly, yet still she took you” (OotP 835-836). This time, Dumbledore doesn’t let Harry get away with using her faults to eliminate her virtue. Obviously Dumbledore doesn’t think she was a good surrogate parent. But he also refuses to condemn her as evil within a binary moral system.
Severus Snape seems to hate Harry from the first second he sets eyes on him, and the feeling quickly becomes mutual. At eleven years old, Harry decides that because Snape picks on him for (apparently) no good reason, he must be evil. For the following six books, nothing can convince him Snape is actually working to protect him. Harry suspects Snape of helping Voldemort in every scheme, even after Dumbledore repeatedly assures him that he trusts Snape completely. Harry doesn’t understand the moral gymnastics required for Snape to put on a convincing show as a double agent. Spying for Dumbledore within Voldemort’s inner circle means maintaining his cover, at all costs. Displaying anything less than hatred of Harry would raise Voldemort’s suspicion. In Harry’s eyes, however, Snape must be as evil as his actions.
After Sirius’s death, Harry uses his righteous certainty of Snape’s guilt to deny his own. He demands Dumbledore give him a good explanation for Snape’s behavior. After getting one, “Harry disregarded this; he felt a savage pleasure in blaming Snape, it seemed to be easing his own sense of dreadful guilt” (OotP 833). Even though it comes at the cost of powerful allies like Snape and Dumbledore, seeing the world in black and white makes Harry’s life far simpler and his emotions easier for him to handle. It isn’t until the very end of the series that Harry finally matures enough to lose this crutch and appreciate shades of grey.
Rowling’s use of third-person limited narrative voice produces an effect similar to the experience of reading the Book of Revelation. Allowing the reader to know only what Harry knows evokes the same feeling of tunnel vision in John of Patmos’s first-person account in the Book of Revelation. By letting the reader see everything Harry sees and feel everything Harry feels, Rowling also allows the reader to share Harry’s transformation from a binary moral system to a non-binary moral system when it happens in the seventh book. The conversation Harry has with Dumbledore before the final battle sets in motion the events that prove Harry has moved beyond binary morality. In the epilogue, nineteen years after the events in the last chapter, Rowling reveals Harry named his middle child Albus Severus, giving him both Dumbledore’s and Snape’s first names. More than signaling Harry’s acceptance of their ambiguous moralities, Albus Severus symbolizes the end of the wizarding world’s metanarrative of prejudice.
At Harry’s school, Hogwarts, students are sorted into four “houses,” or dormitories. Each is known for different personality traits – Hufflepuffs are loyal, Ravenclaws are smart, Slytherins are ambitious, and Gryffindors are brave. Under these simple adjectives, however, lies the metanarrative that explains conflict in the wizarding world. Slytherins are shady characters, if not downright evil. As Hagrid tells Harry in Book 1, “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin. You-Know-Who [Voldemort] was one” (Sorcerer’s Stone). In addition to Voldemort, Snape was in Slytherin, as was Harry’s childhood nemesis Draco Malfoy. Harry’s experiences with Slytherins paint them as prejudiced against Muggles, power-hungry, and devious. Gryffindors, on the other hand, can do no wrong.
This dualism is reinforced throughout the books, up to and including the final battle, during which all the Slytherins leave the school to protect themselves or fight with Voldemort, and almost all the Gryffindors try to stay and fight. The only hint that there might be an alternative is Dumbledore’s speech after Voldemort is reborn. “Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust” (GOF 723). That Harry’s son is named after members of both houses who were not wholly good or evil recognizes the need to bridge the rift between the two houses. The Gryffindor-Slytherin combination is a unification of contraries, and represents the end of apocalyptic morality in the wizarding world.
Harry’s eventual acceptance of Snape’s true loyalty and Dumbledore’s transformation from devil to god to neither one or the other would have impossible within a binary framework. The fact that Dumbledore could embody all three identities forces readers to consider “very complex and shaded questions that the entity now poses about the nature of evil…” (Rosen 17). By inviting the reader to share Harry’s transcendence of the apocalyptic moral paradigm, Rowling “satisfies the need we all feel for meaning that is not moralizing and for virtue that is heroic and uniting rather than divisive” (Granger, Keys 236).
References
Granger, John. The Deathly Hallows Lectures: The Hogwarts Professor Explains the Final Harry Potter Adventure. 2nd ed. Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2008. Print.
—. Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader. Allentown, PA: Zossima Press, 2007. Print.
Rosen, Elizabeth. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lanham, MD: Lexington – Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York, New York: Scholastic, 1999. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. New York, New York: Scholastic, 2007. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York, New York: Scholastic, 2000. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. New York, New York: Scholastic, 2005. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York, New York: Scholastic, 2003. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York, New York: Scholastic, 1999. Print.
—. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York, New York: Scholastic, 1998. Print.
