Harry Potter and the Narrative Charnel House
Kathleen Bolton on Jul 30 2007 | Filed under: Book Talk, CRAFT
Warning: If you don’t want to hear what happened in the book, don’t read this. There are spoilers ahead.
It read like an episode of the Sopranos.
Beloved characters die gruesome deaths with little or no mourning for their passing. A caged animal blows up. A hat bursts into flames while being worn. The mucus pouring from a dying man’s orifices is collected and studied. A snake punches out of the neck of an old woman’s rotting cadaver.
These vignettes of violence wouldn’t be so shocking except that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is supposed to be a book written about children for children. Maybe they’re shocking because of it.
Now I’m not going to tsk and say we should shield children completely from violence and the consequences of evil. But I was unprepared for JK Rowling’s bloodbath and, honestly, I couldn’t really understand why she’d need to torture and kill so many of her characters. I’ve given it a lot of thought from a writer’s standpoint, taking into account narrative tension, the motivations of her antagonists, and plot relevance.
I still don’t get it.
Lest you think I’m a prissy prude about killing off beloved characters, I’m a big fan of employing what I term The Boromir Effect, which means killing off a major sub-character to ratchet the tension and the stakes. It’s a technique to place your protagonists in more jeopardy while making the antagonists more invincible. You’re telling the reader that the baddies (and by extension, you) mean business and that no one is safe. It’s a time-tested narrative device.
But an over-reliance of The Boromir Effect can have the opposite effect on your reader. By killing off so many characters in a relatively short space (like one book instead of a series of books) you risk numbing your reader to violence and horror. They stop caring and you’ve actually undercut the tension. I really mourned when Cedric Diggory, a minor character, died in Goblet of Fire. I could barely process the deaths of major characters Tonks and Lupin and Fred Weasley. Poor Severus Snape, Rowling’s most sophisticated and fully-realized character, deserved a Shakespearean death. Instead he dies and is never mentioned again (except for a tiny homage in the Epilogue).
Back to Deathly Hallows. I suppose Rowling thought she was making a point that no one was safe in the overarching storyline. Evil held full sway. But I couldn’t help but wish she’d been more judicious in her body-count; less dead would have allowed her to milk more drama out of the ones who did die.
What do you think? Did JKR kill too many characters in her final book? Or not enough?
Photo credit: SpookyChan
Kathleen Bolton
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Not too many. Enough? I’m not sure.
I think she was emphasizing the brutality, futality, and randomness of war. In a war, the body count just goes up and up. In major battles lots of people can die for little or no percieved gain. I was waiting for someone to get hit with “friendly fire”.
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I agree. Through all the deaths and all the violence I was able to pretend to know what it is like to be in that kind of war. I really felt that Rowling realized in book seven what she’d been leading up to for six books. I didn’t feel that I had enough time to mourn, but I didn’t feel that Harry did either. That’s a common theme in stories about wars, though- there isn’t time to grieve. You just have to go on and make their sacrifice worth something.
I believe Rowling has been quoted that this was never intended to be a story about children, for children. Remember, before she even began writing the first book, she spent over five years working out the plot for all seven. She knew the last book would be dark.
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I understand the way she killed off characters, but I wasn’t happy with it. I see that there’s not much of a way she could have *shown* us some character’s deaths, because Harry wasn’t there to see them. But these were some of my favorite characters, and it seemed like the deaths were glossed over in cases. I tore through the book in about 6 hours early Saturday morning, but I always had to stop for a moment to mourn, and I wonder that JK didn’t give us that moment.
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I agree with the quick and what I thought needless slaughter of characters. I also understand the argument that we were reading about a war, and needless deaths happen.
I think Rowling will go into more detail about the deaths of favorite characters in her hinted-at Encyclopedia of Potter. I mean, I think she sort of owes it to the Lupin and Tonks fans, especially since she killed off the one couple who just had a baby.
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goodness, righteousness and the pureness of intentions can transcend the death. death in and of itself is not evil. a life cut short by villany is evil. hope, bravery and great sacrifice is part of the coinage we pay for resisting the forces of evil
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I do wish she hadn’t killed so many, but I understand why she did it. It had the feel of uncontrolled chaos, just like in a war, and I suppose JKR needed that to jar the reader out of complacency and understand Harry’s situation keenly. Anything could’ve happened. The safety net of Harry’s childhood, and even the mothering between him and JKR, was over.
Still, lots of sad moments.
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I can’t agree with your criticism of Deathly Hallows. A number of important characters did die, but the book is based in a war situation, it would be unrealistic if at the end of the book all our favourite characters came away unscathed. I feel that all of the deaths in the book are justified and make sense, it would be ridiculous if JKR didn’t kill off some characters simply because it would upset some readers. Harry Potter was her story which came from her own head and she had to be true to the plot. Also, while a good number of characters do die, many more important characters survive. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Ginny and Neville all live. They are characters who have been present since the very beginning of the series, unlike some of the characters that did die: Tonks, Lupin and Moody.
The Harry Potter books are not books about children for children. They are books about death, and one boy’s battle to save the world. Harry is seventeen in Deathly Hallows, hardly a child. JKR has said that she wrote what she felt and did not aim the books at a certain age group, the publishers decided they would be published as children’s books. I think that these books should be read as they were released, with a year between each book, so that children grow up with Harry, adjusting as he adjusts.
I also feel that the way you have described parts of the books are warped and misleading. Hedwig does not explode, she just dies when hit by a curse, her death represents a definite end to Harry’s childhood. “The mucus pouring from a dying man’s orifices is collected and studied”: Mucus?? This is a completely misleading statement. Snape’s thoughts are collected by Harry at Snape’s request, so that Harry might understand that Snape was protecting him all along. You’re making these statements as though these events were added merely for dramatic effect, when in fact they are key to the book’s plot. “A snake punches out of the neck of an old woman’s rotting cadaver”, yes, because the snake contained part of Voldemort’s soul and he used it in disguise to lure Harry into a trap.
It seems to me that you don’t understand the world of Harry Potter if this is how you perceive the events of Deathly Hallows. Perhaps you should look at the series as what it is, creative fantasy with a complex story line, and not a representation of actual events. If it does not follow convention in the number of characters that die, or the way in which they die, then that is just credit to JKR’s individuality as a writer.
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Easy there, Caoimhe. You must not be a regular reader of the blog if you don’t know we–and especially me–regard JKR very highly as a storyteller. No one’s disputing that she needed a body count in the last book. I was pointing out that her over-emphasis on the body count–in my opinion only, dear–undercut the drama she was trying to create.
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Perhaps if The Deathly Hallows were a stand-alone book, rather than then end of an epic, agreement would be easier for me. But it isn’t. While I agree that there isn’t time to mourn the deaths of Tonks and Lupin, of Snape and Fred (whose death shocked me most, I think), Rowling isn’t following the typical single-novel model of tension, drama, etc; she has placed herself explicitly in another tradition, a tradition in which death, even if apparently gratuitous, isn’t pointless, but necessary. Her theme, like that of the Narnia series and Lord of The Rings, is that death that comes in the service of a greater good — the resistance to evil — is noble and right. The point is for people to die fighting.
In its body count, DH isn’t all that different from Lord of the Rings. But neither of those two books can touch Lewis’ The Last Battle, in which every good character dies. Although they are also all changed, and live on in Aslan’s land, the death count there is pretty shocking. And there’s no question that Lewis’ series was written for kids. This is the tradition in which Rowling has placed herself, and it has its own rules of action and drama. I don’t think Rowling has done too badly, though I’m not sure that any of her deaths reach, for me, the high point of the deaths of the Talking Horses in The Last Battle (the most senseless death in any such book, IMO).
So I don’t think that the emphasis on the body count undercut the drama. While it may be numbing, I suspect that is rather the point, as others have said before me.
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