----What sort of monstrous baby would not get even slightly upset at hearing his mother screaming and begging for mercy, followed by her falling down?
Perhaps a baby who was so traumatized that he had gone into a state of shock.
We have to keep in mind that we're reading Harry's reaction to his mother's death from Tom's perspective, and by then Tom had long lost whatever capacity he might have ever had for empathizing with a toddler. Tom may believe that Harry was calmly watching everything with "bright interest," but this might not be at all what Harry was actually thinking and feeling.
A search on Google for "babies and trauma" links to a page from the Australian government saying that common reactions to trauma in babies and toddlers include A kind of ‘frozen watchfulness’ - the child may have a ‘shocked’ look and Giving the appearance of being numb and not showing their feelings or seeming a bit ‘cut off’ from what is happening around them.
Recall how many people's immediate response to watching the WTC towers fall on 9/11 was not to start screaming and crying hysterically but to stand silently frozen in place wearing open-mouthed expressions of fascinated horror and disbelief at what they were seeing. If Harry's immediate reaction to watching his mother die was anything similar, it's very easy to imagine Tom misinterpreting it as "bright interest."
As evidence for just how traumatized Harry probably was in reality---dementors feed on one's worst memories, and the very first memory that the dementors extract from Harry is the sound of his mother screaming.
Possible. But at some point Harry pulled himself up to watch the proceedings after being unceremoniously dumped into his crib, so he wasn't quite frozen, and this was after his parents had started yelling and his mother in particular was beginning to panic and throw things against the door. He also starts crying after only after Tom enters his field of vision and Harry has time to register him and recognize him as a stranger. It's possible that that would be enough stimulus to jerk him out of his shock, but it's a little odd that the presence of a stranger would do so as opposed to any of the sudden shifts in his mother's behavior (screaming to blockading the door to cradling him to crying to begging to silence). Of course, Harry isn't the brightest of characters ever penned. Maybe it just took him a while to process everything...
Whether or not the dementor induced recollections are actually Harry's is a bit debatable. It is possible that the memories were pulled from the partially split horcrux, and not Harry himself.
Perhaps a baby who was so traumatized that he had gone into a state of shock.
We have to keep in mind that we're reading Harry's reaction to his mother's death from Tom's perspective, and by then Tom had long lost whatever capacity he might have ever had for empathizing with a toddler. Tom may believe that Harry was calmly watching everything with "bright interest," but this might not be at all what Harry was actually thinking and feeling.
A search on Google for "babies and trauma" links to a page from the Australian government saying that common reactions to trauma in babies and toddlers include A kind of ‘frozen watchfulness’ - the child may have a ‘shocked’ look and Giving the appearance of being numb and not showing their feelings or seeming a bit ‘cut off’ from what is happening around them.
Recall how many people's immediate response to watching the WTC towers fall on 9/11 was not to start screaming and crying hysterically but to stand silently frozen in place wearing open-mouthed expressions of fascinated horror and disbelief at what they were seeing. If Harry's immediate reaction to watching his mother die was anything similar, it's very easy to imagine Tom misinterpreting it as "bright interest."
As evidence for just how traumatized Harry probably was in reality---dementors feed on one's worst memories, and the very first memory that the dementors extract from Harry is the sound of his mother screaming.
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Whether or not the dementor induced recollections are actually Harry's is a bit debatable. It is possible that the memories were pulled from the partially split horcrux, and not Harry himself.
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