Mugglenet.com's Harry Potter Should Have Died - Emerson Spartz [60]
Then there is Severus Snape, the dark antihero of the tale, who resembles the tormented Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is an “abandoned boy,” like Snape, and his childhood friend, Cathy, becomes the love of his life; her later rejection drives him to despair. For Snape, it is the death of Lily Evans Potter that causes his grief, but, unlike Heathcliff, he tries to overcome his dark side. As the young Half-Blood Prince, Snape is an innocent child in his oversized hand-me-down coats looking much like The Little Prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who worries about his “Flower,” which parallels Snape and his concern for Lily. Both The Little Prince and Severus Snape are killed by a snake, which echoes another character, the legendary hero Beowulf. That character is attacked in a dark lair by a serpent, and as Beowulf dies he wants only to see his “treasure” once more: For Snape, that means the green eyes of Lily Potter. There are even traces in Snape of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, about a man who is torn from his true love, but seeks perfect revenge on those who destroyed his happiness.
J.K.R. has mentioned before that one of her models as a writer is Jane Austen’s Emma, and that is perhaps why romance in Harry’s world is similarly fraught with misunderstandings, lost loves, confusion, and jealousy. People are not what they seem at first glance, and love can be surprising, as Harry learns himself with Cho and Ginny, and later with the relationship of Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks. The pureblood wizarding families arrange marriages to protect the bloodline, but those are not always the happiest of unions, which is a mirror of British society in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In that book, the characters instinctively know that the best love is spontaneous and freely given, a major theme of all the Harry Potter books.
As high fantasies, the Potter books are right up there with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series. But those aren’t the only similar classics. J. K. Rowling has said many times she based some of the fantasy elements on The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, as well as E. Nesbit’s The Book of Dragons and The Phoenix and the Carpet. When Harry is whisked away from the everyday Muggle world to another dangerous place where there are good and bad witches, he follows the same yellow brick road as Dorothy (still another orphan) in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. And, of course, Harry is almost literally Through the Looking Glass, where everything is backwards from the real world, just as in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonder-land. Hagrid’s love of animals is much like the generous Dr. Dolittle created by Hugh Lofting; the Weasleys in the Burrow manage to survive like the tiny Clock family in Mary Norton’s The Borrowers; and, of course, everyone flies around doing magic like Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie and Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers. The list is probably endless, but the Harry Potter books have a permanent place among these great works of art.
Verdict
Does a book have to be around for fifty or even one hundred years in order to be a classic? Or, is there such a thing as an instant classic that people can appreciate on many levels right away? A true classic probably has both the continuing audience and the recognizable motifs that stand the test of the ages. Since the Harry Potter books meet both standards, the verdict is: Yes, the Harry Potter books belong on bookshelves alongside the all-time great novels.
Is Xenophilius Lovegood a traitor?
Yes!
No matter how funny or charming he is, Mr. Lovegood is one of the biggest traitors in the whole series. In DH, he tries to sell Harry, Hermione, and Ron to the Death Eaters! He should have realized that there was a better way to save Luna from the Death Eaters and that Harry would have helped him track her down, but that doesn’t seem to enter his mind. And even if