J.K. Rowling’s fictional story about dualism and prejudice in the wizarding world is clearly based on the apocalyptic myth of the Book of Revelation. Rowling’s use of third-person limited narrative voice produces an effect similar to the experience of reading the Book of Revelation. Restricting the audience’s experience to Harry’s point of view conveys the same feeling of tunnel vision evoked by John of Patmos’s first-person account in the Book of Revelation. In the traditional story, however, the prophet never questions the authenticity of his vision. John of Patmos insists he “received and passed on the Truth as total, complete and forever the same” (Quinby, Millennial Seduction 28). Harry, on the other hand, is an often-clueless teenage boy who sees the world in terms of black and white. Rowling limits her narration to Harry’s point of view to create an intentionally unreliable narrator.
By preventing the audience from trusting the narrator and/or prophet, postmodern apocalyptic authors challenge two elements of the traditional apocalyptic narrative: divine authority and receiver of the revelation. If the audience has reason to mistrust the prophet’s reliability or knowledge, is the prophet himself is defective? Or is the divine figure issuing the revelation not really omnipotent after all? In Harry Potter, the answer is a little bit of both. At the end of every book, a conversation takes place between Harry and Dumbledore, the headmaster of Harry’s school. Without fail, Dumbledore divulges vital information that finally reveals the bigger picture behind Harry’s personal experiences throughout the school year. After the first few books, the annual repetition of this scene is laughably predictable. The reasonable assumption, therefore, that Harry never knows all of the facts requires readers to doubt the validity, or at least the scope, of any “truth” Harry believes to be certain and complete. That Rowling practically demands this skepticism from the reader stands in stark contrast to the idea of Truth as revealed to John at Patmos and set down in the Book of Revelation.
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 in her analysis of Alan Moore’s work, 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 audience) knows Dumbledore as 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 fully expects Dumbledore to be the savior of the wizarding world, the only one who possesses the incredible strength and skill necessary to defeat Voldemort.
Throughout the fifth, six, and seventh books, this vision of Dumbledore is systematically destroyed. Harry gradually loses faith in Dumbledore as he learns about the more unsavory details of his past. In their annual chat at the end of 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). In this scene, not only must Harry accept the fact that the great Dumbledore’s plans were deeply flawed, but he also realizes that it is his task to defeat Voldemort. For the first time, Dumbledore is neither all-knowing nor all-powerful, which introduces Harry and the readers to the skeptical argument that “truth itself is dialogical…attained and revealed through communication with the thoughts of others” (Quinby, Millennial Seduction 26). 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 god-like 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” (Deathly Hallows 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 ever be anything but “the embodiment of goodness and wisdom,” Harry knew him as later in his life, but eventually the evidence against Dumbledore is overwhelming (DH 360). Harry, seeing the world in terms of moral absolutes, reacts by starting to hate Dumbledore. Dumbledore’s fall from grace, his transformation from God to Devil, is complete; Harry’s feelings about him could not be more different than the respect and adoration he felt in the first four books.
In postmodern apocalyptic fiction, “the apocalyptic ‘world’ which is destroyed can also be flexibly interpreted” (Rosen xxii). Figurative worlds include specific communities, individuals, or even an individual mind (Rosen xxii). Again, Rowling’s apocalypse is somewhat of a combination of the two; there are elements of both individual and communal destruction. One of the most moving passages of the series is towards the end of the final book, when Harry realizes he must sacrifice himself to save the rest of the wizarding world. “Terror washed over him as he lay on the floor, with that funeral drum pounding inside him. Would it hurt to die?… It was over, he knew it, and all that was left was the thing itself: dying” (DH 692).
The end of Harry’s personal world, however, occurs in the midst of the final battle of the war against Voldemort. Hogwarts, Harry’s school and the center of the wizarding community (second only to its government, the Ministry of Magic), is attacked, and just before Harry learns about the necessity of his own demise, he sees that “the situation within the castle had deteriorated severely: The walls and ceiling were shaking worse than ever; dust filled the air, and through the nearest window Harry saw bursts of red and green light so close to the foot of the castle that he knew the Death Eaters [the attacking army] must be very near to entering the place” (DH 626). After Harry witnesses Ron’s brother being killed, “The world had ended, so why had the battle not ceased, the castle fallen silent in horror, and every combatant laid down their arms [emphasis added]” (DH 638)? The Death Eaters do breach the walls of the castle, the death toll mounts, and it becomes clear the students and teachers defending the school have no hope of victory.
The fourth element of the apocalypse is judgment, a particularly difficult element for postmodern writers to adapt, due to “postmodernism’s refusal to privilege one culture or point of view over another” (Rosen xxiv). The great extent to which authors like Rowling rely on the traditional story raises questions about whether it is even possible to use the traditional apocalyptic narrative to critique the traditional apocalyptic binary. In Harry Potter, like the Book of Revelation, one side wins, and one side loses. Is Rowling merely perpetuating traditional apocalypticism by celebrating the superiority of good, tolerant people, and condemning bad, prejudiced people?
The author admits that in her story, “undeniably, morals are drawn” (Grossman 2). But Rowling avoids the binary structure of the original myth by creating morally ambiguous characters on both sides of the war between Harry and Voldemort. She creates a spectrum of good and evil, instead of two separate and opposing groups. Although this isn’t a complete departure from a binary worldview, it is enough of an alternative to allow the Harry Potter series to challenge the damaging effects of apocalyptic dualism in our society. Rowling offers a combination of the five traditional essential elements of apocalypse, a postmodern rejection of metanarratives of prejudice, and an emphasis on the power of love to create an alternative moral system that is not bound by dualistic extremes, but, rather, transcendence of apocalyptic morality.
Holding off on the New Jerusalem element for a moment, and returning to the issue of narrator, by letting the reader experience the world through Harry’s eyes, seeing everything Harry sees and feeling everything Harry feels, Rowling also allows the reader to share Harry’s personal evolution from a binary worldview to a non-binary worldview when it happens in the seventh book. The next two sections will provide examples of the limits of dualism in Harry’s world, and his eventual transcendence to accepting an alternative worldview and arrival in New Jerusalem.
