A Game of Two Halves: Duality in Harry Potter
First Half
There is a great emphasis on duality in the Harry Potter story. Again and again we read of people, places, events, and relationships that have a double nature. Duality enlivens the story and complicates it, delighting and perplexing the reader in the process. It links J. K. Rowling’s magical world with every reader’s daily experience. It connects directly with Dumbledore’s famous statement in CoS, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” It’s one of the things that show us HP is an alchemical work. It tells us, perhaps, how the story will end.
We encounter duality in HP even before we open a book. There on each cover is the title, always in two parts, naming two subjects: Harry Potter and … the philosopher’s stone, chamber of secrets, prisoner of Azkaban &c &c. Inside the covers we discover a world divided in two, between Muggles and Wizards. The narrative kicks off with a double-natured event, the marvellous defeat of Voldemort that is also the cruel murder of Lily and James. The villain of the story has two identities, Tom Riddle and Lord Voldemort. We soon find ourselves reading two concurrent stories, one serious - the story of Harry’s struggle with Voldemort, the other comic - the story of Harry and his schoolmates growing up at Hogwarts. The two stories overlap and interconnect, of course, but give us two Harrys, one the hero of a mythic battle against evil and Voldemort, the other a schoolboy caught up in inter-house rivalry and a personal squabble with Draco.
Much of the duality in HP is a delight, adding to the magic of Rowling’s magical world. There are double-natured creatures: animagi, half-giants, centaurs, werewolves, hippogryphs. There are twins and mirrors. Quirrelmort and polyjuiced Moody are more on the sinister side, and contribute to the mystery - ‘whodunit’- element of the story. There are poignant dualities. James was betrayed by his friend, and Snape was saved by his enemy. We see Sirius most alive at the moment of his death. Harry’s altruistic decision to share the TriWizard Cup with Cedric leads to Cedric’s murder. Harry is safe at the Dursleys’, where he is neglected, if not abused. Harry and Neville are linked by the prophecy and by the loss of their parents; while Harry is bold and reckless, Neville is timid and halting. Harry’s tragedy is public property; Neville’s is unnoticed and unremarked.
There are intriguing repetitions across the narrative: Harry is the spit of his father, James - and he has his mother’s eyes. Dumbledore compares Harry and Draco to James and Snape. In PoA a whole sequence of events is repeated from a different viewpoint via the Time Turner. Harry asks Slughorn about horcruxes in almost the same words as Riddle. Voldemort immobilises Harry in the graveyard, and Dumbledore immobilises Harry in the Astronomy Tower. Harry compares his experience surrounded by Death Eaters in the graveyard to Snape’s surrounded by mocking students in the pensieve. There are Barty Crouch Senior and Barty Crouch Junior.
There are complex dualities, paradoxical, downright contradictory, problematic. Harry is a Gryffindor who the Sorting Hat thought would do well in Slytherin. Dumbledore tells him his power is love, but he is motivated too by hatred - of Voldemort, Snape, Draco, Umbridge. Dumbledore is powerful and wise, and - by his own admission - makes enormous mistakes. He assumes responsibility for Harry, and leaves him to the Dursleys’ cruelty. He proclaims the power of love, yet is unprepared for the love he feels for Harry. Then there’s Snape, spy for Dumbledore and spy for Voldemort. He’s an accomplished occlumens who (we are led to believe) can fool Voldemort, but he cannot control his feelings when faced with Harry, Sirius, or the memory of James. Hagrid is a wise fool. Dolores Umbridge affects a sickly-sweet persona as she commits her bureaucratic atrocities. She is a stickler for rules, but acts outside them herself, to the extent of torture and murder. Marvolo Gaunt is obsessively proud of his family’s heritage, yet does nothing to grace it himself, living in squalor and abusing his children, the next generation of the family.
The paradoxes extend to the relationships between characters. Voldemort and Harry are not merely opposites but are mysteriously connected, and share experiences and skills, and -since Voldemort’s rebirth in the graveyard - blood. (Voldemort is reborn in a graveyard!) Ron and Hermione love each other, but disagree and bicker all the time. Harry and Draco are enemies and opposites, yet both find themselves unable to kill - Harry with Sirius in the Shrieking Shack, and Draco with Dumbledore in the Astronomy Tower. And their enmity began with an offer of friendship. Harry continues to love and respect Dumbledore, and accept his authority, despite disagreeing with him more and more. Dumbledore loves Harry and requires much of him, but keeps crucial information from him. Snape loathes Harry, yet protected him from Quirrel. And, best of all, Harry feels happy and safe at Hogwarts - where there are moving staircases, missing steps, trolls in the dungeon, a malicious poltergeist, Fred and George, Draco Malfoy, quidditch, Fluffy, Voldemort and Tom Riddle, a basilisk, Dolores Umbridge, dementors, Death Eaters, werewolves, and the Forbidden Forest next door!
Second Half
Duality and the Reader
The effect of all these dualities is that just about everything and everyone in Rowling’s magical world is open to question - and to interpretation, and to change. There seems to be nothing that we readers can solidly and continually depend on in our quest to understand the story, which is frustrating (not to say frightening) but liberating too. It’s what causes some of us to sympathise with the Slytherins and frown upon the Gryffindors! This doubt and uncertainty about people, ideas, events is perhaps surprising in a children’s story about good and evil, but it is a truth that every reader can recognise from their own experience in their own world. A glance at the news or a consideration of oneself, one’s family, one’s friends are all it takes to understand that right and wrong, good and bad, serious and comic are neither immutable nor neatly separated. Things are no different in Rowling’s magical world.
Duality and Choice
The uncertainty of the magical world ties in with Dumbledore’s statement in CoS that “It is our choices … that show what we truly are”: if this is so, what we are changes with each choice. Dumbledore talks about choice further in HBP when he tells Harry, “You are setting too much store by the prophecy!” Voldemort was not required to act on the prophecy, he chose to act, and he chose how. Harry can choose too. There are limits to Harry’s choice, or to the power of his choice, as Dumbledore acknowledges, because Voldemort seems set on killing him, but the choice is there. Merope’s story shows the power an individual has to forge his or her own destiny, and its limits too. Merope defied her upbringing to act on her love for Tom Riddle, then gambled on Riddle’s affection and lost, and was destroyed by the loss. Draco accepting Voldemort’s task of killing Dumbledore shows how complex choice can be. A mess of fear, love and ambition are what moved him, and it’s hard to say which impulse was strongest, or which caused him to hesitate at the last moment.
There is also in HP, among the double-natured creatures, a suggestion that the power to choose - that is, free will - is not only stronger than “our abilities” but stronger than what might be considered our natures. Fred and George are twins; so are Parvati and Padma. Fred and George are inseparable and both in Gryffindor; Parvati and Padma are independent of each other, one in Gryffindor, one in Ravenclaw. There are two werewolves; Lupin has chosen to be human, Greyback to be a monstrous wolf. The story takes this notion even further, however. One of the dualities set up in the story is that of the elves and the centaurs. Elves delight in serving wizards and subjugate themselves to their wizard masters so far as to seek punishment or to punish themselves if they fall short in their duty. Centaurs hold themselves proudly aloof from wizards, and such is their horror of subjugation they will not help wizards even in dire need. Both Dobby and Firenze make conscious decisions to break through the limits that supposedly define them. Dobby disobeys his master to warn Harry, and embraces freedom; Firenze protects Harry, even allowing him to sit on his back, and leaves the Forest in order to help Dumbledore. This notion, that each of us is what he or she chooses to be, is important for our understanding of Harry and Voldemort. Readers have tried to explain them, their differences and their similarities, by reference to their backgrounds and upbringing, but not convincingly. In the end Harry and Voldemort are not explicable. Each of them is as he is because that is what he chooses.
If one accepts the notion of free will, of choice, it is a great liberation. One quickly recognises, however, that it is also a necessity, a duty even, because if one does not choose, the choice is made for one. The failure to choose is, perhaps, what is at the heart of Severus Snape. Snape is the servant of two masters, though he seems happy with neither. In HBP when Harry calls him a coward, Snape is described as looking as though he is in as much pain as Fang, “stuck in the burning house”. Is this not the essence of Snape, that he sees himself as trapped, as having no choice? For sixteen years he can’t even get the job he wants! He is hemmed in - from the past by his father’s brutality, and James’s and Sirius’s mockery, in the present by Dumbledore’s authority and Voldemort’s power. In HBP Hagrid, in the Forest, overhears him grumbling under the one, and we, in his first Defence lesson, hear him expressing his awe of the other. In the Astronomy Tower Snape is forced by circumstances to kill Dumbledore - or that’s how he sees it. But as he flees from Hogwarts he realises that in failing to choose Dumbledore in that crucial moment, he has pledged himself to Voldemort. Harry’s accusation of cowardice enrages and distresses him precisely because he knows it’s true.
Duality and Alchemy
There can be no doubt that HP is an alchemical story. The title of the first book was the first enormous clue to this, and it is confirmed when the Mirror of Erised shows Harry’s heart’s desire to be to find the philosopher’s stone. Alchemical imagery runs through the entire series. All of the following are grounded in alchemy: James and Lily dying and Harry living, Hogwarts, the stone, the golden snitch, lion and dragon, Dumbledore’s phoenix, the names Black, Albus and Rubeus, Ron and Hermione, Neville’s toad and Umbridge’s toad-like appearance, the golden egg in GoF, Harry in the bath in GoF, Luna, Greyback, Harry and Draco’s fight in the bathroom… and there are plenty more.
The aim of the alchemist and the purpose of alchemy is the creation of the philosopher’s stone, which gives eternal life and turns base matter into gold. In alchemy there is no separation between the spiritual and the material, so that in creating the stone and transforming base matter into gold, the alchemist transforms his understanding into spiritual gold - enlightenment, understanding that transcends birth and death - that is, eternal life. Creating the philosopher’s stone and attaining this understanding are the same thing, the one brings about the other and vice versa. In HP Harry’s dual goal is to understand himself and to vanquish Voldemort. Neither is possible without the other.
Although material and spiritual are one in alchemy, alchemy is beset by duality. It is a quest for truth that in the wrong hands is merely a swindler’s con-trick. It is a search for knowledge and understanding that can also be the vain pursuit of wealth and immortality. And alchemy is itself concerned with duality. The philosopher’s stone is created by achieving a balance of two opposite elements, sulphur and mercury. Sulphur, also called Sol (sun), is hot and dry; mercury, also called Luna (moon), is cold and wet. Between them sulphur and mercury, as they contain the four elements - fire, water, earth and air - call to mind the four houses of Hogwarts, and the opposition of Gryffindor and Slytherin: the Gryffindor dormitory is a high tower and its focus is a fireplace (fire and air); the Slytherin dormitory is a deep dungeon and lies beneath the lake (earth and water). In OotP the Sorting Hat makes a plea for unity among the Hogwarts houses as essential against the threat of Voldemort, just as the alchemist works to unite sulphur and mercury to make the stone.
To deter those motivated by material gain alchemical texts are deliberately obscure and contradictory, and employ fantastical imagery and images. In HP the rumbustious comedy of life at Hogwarts obscures and contradicts Harry’s struggle to overcome Voldemort. But the images and imagery of alchemy are a joy, and so is the comedy of Hogwarts, and one would hate to lose it or to see Harry lose it, he loves it so much! The unity the alchemist seeks and Hogwarts needs, then, is not a reduction that rejects variety and complexity but an expansion that embraces them. At Hogwarts - and for Harry himself - the expansion needed is the inclusion of Slytherin. OotP saw a unity of the other three houses in the DA, and it was through excluded Slytherin that Voldemort’s followers entered the school in HBP. Harry is a bridge between Gryffindor and Slytherin. He may be “a true Gryffindor”, but the Sorting Hat thought of putting him in Slytherin, and he does have green eyes and a silver invisibility cloak! And in PS, before the sorting, we see him caught in the middle of the rivalry between Draco and Ron, his friendship desired by both.
To describe the goings-on at Hogwarts as comedy is not to belittle them. Hogwarts, with all its splendour, mischief, unfairness, absurdity, horror and fun, represents the world, and it is wonderful that Harry is happy there, that he loves it and wants to be part of it. At Hogwarts Harry learns from his teachers and from his schoolmates not only how to fight Voldemort but how to live in the world. Why else should Harry try so hard to understand himself and vanquish Voldemort if not so he can live happily ever after?! He is like the alchemist, who in working to create the philosopher’s stone works to understand himself and the world, and not like Voldemort, running after an illusion, or Snape, trapped in a prison of his own making.
Duality and the End of the Story
If, for the alchemist, the greatest duality is birth and death, then for the writer, it is beginning and end. The end of a story always, to some extent, resolves the questions posed by the beginning, but the perfect resolution - alchemically speaking - is for the story to end at the beginning. Most of what we long to know in HP has been a mystery since the beginning. What exactly happened at Godric’s Hollow on 31 October 1981? Who was there? Why did Lily not need to die? Why did her death destroy Voldemort and protect Harry from him? What is the meaning of Harry’s scar? Was Snape there? Whose side was he on? Why did Dumbledore trust him? The questions are at the beginning of the story, and the answers are there too, so that’s where Harry must go to find them, and that’s where the story will end, at the beginning. Readers may recall that, when Harry looked into the Mirror of Erised in PS he did not, in fact, see himself finding the philosopher’s stone, he saw that he already had it.
There is a great emphasis on duality in the Harry Potter story. Again and again we read of people, places, events, and relationships that have a double nature. Duality enlivens the story and complicates it, delighting and perplexing the reader in the process. It links J. K. Rowling’s magical world with every reader’s daily experience. It connects directly with Dumbledore’s famous statement in CoS, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” It’s one of the things that show us HP is an alchemical work. It tells us, perhaps, how the story will end.
We encounter duality in HP even before we open a book. There on each cover is the title, always in two parts, naming two subjects: Harry Potter and … the philosopher’s stone, chamber of secrets, prisoner of Azkaban &c &c. Inside the covers we discover a world divided in two, between Muggles and Wizards. The narrative kicks off with a double-natured event, the marvellous defeat of Voldemort that is also the cruel murder of Lily and James. The villain of the story has two identities, Tom Riddle and Lord Voldemort. We soon find ourselves reading two concurrent stories, one serious - the story of Harry’s struggle with Voldemort, the other comic - the story of Harry and his schoolmates growing up at Hogwarts. The two stories overlap and interconnect, of course, but give us two Harrys, one the hero of a mythic battle against evil and Voldemort, the other a schoolboy caught up in inter-house rivalry and a personal squabble with Draco.
Much of the duality in HP is a delight, adding to the magic of Rowling’s magical world. There are double-natured creatures: animagi, half-giants, centaurs, werewolves, hippogryphs. There are twins and mirrors. Quirrelmort and polyjuiced Moody are more on the sinister side, and contribute to the mystery - ‘whodunit’- element of the story. There are poignant dualities. James was betrayed by his friend, and Snape was saved by his enemy. We see Sirius most alive at the moment of his death. Harry’s altruistic decision to share the TriWizard Cup with Cedric leads to Cedric’s murder. Harry is safe at the Dursleys’, where he is neglected, if not abused. Harry and Neville are linked by the prophecy and by the loss of their parents; while Harry is bold and reckless, Neville is timid and halting. Harry’s tragedy is public property; Neville’s is unnoticed and unremarked.
There are intriguing repetitions across the narrative: Harry is the spit of his father, James - and he has his mother’s eyes. Dumbledore compares Harry and Draco to James and Snape. In PoA a whole sequence of events is repeated from a different viewpoint via the Time Turner. Harry asks Slughorn about horcruxes in almost the same words as Riddle. Voldemort immobilises Harry in the graveyard, and Dumbledore immobilises Harry in the Astronomy Tower. Harry compares his experience surrounded by Death Eaters in the graveyard to Snape’s surrounded by mocking students in the pensieve. There are Barty Crouch Senior and Barty Crouch Junior.
There are complex dualities, paradoxical, downright contradictory, problematic. Harry is a Gryffindor who the Sorting Hat thought would do well in Slytherin. Dumbledore tells him his power is love, but he is motivated too by hatred - of Voldemort, Snape, Draco, Umbridge. Dumbledore is powerful and wise, and - by his own admission - makes enormous mistakes. He assumes responsibility for Harry, and leaves him to the Dursleys’ cruelty. He proclaims the power of love, yet is unprepared for the love he feels for Harry. Then there’s Snape, spy for Dumbledore and spy for Voldemort. He’s an accomplished occlumens who (we are led to believe) can fool Voldemort, but he cannot control his feelings when faced with Harry, Sirius, or the memory of James. Hagrid is a wise fool. Dolores Umbridge affects a sickly-sweet persona as she commits her bureaucratic atrocities. She is a stickler for rules, but acts outside them herself, to the extent of torture and murder. Marvolo Gaunt is obsessively proud of his family’s heritage, yet does nothing to grace it himself, living in squalor and abusing his children, the next generation of the family.
The paradoxes extend to the relationships between characters. Voldemort and Harry are not merely opposites but are mysteriously connected, and share experiences and skills, and -since Voldemort’s rebirth in the graveyard - blood. (Voldemort is reborn in a graveyard!) Ron and Hermione love each other, but disagree and bicker all the time. Harry and Draco are enemies and opposites, yet both find themselves unable to kill - Harry with Sirius in the Shrieking Shack, and Draco with Dumbledore in the Astronomy Tower. And their enmity began with an offer of friendship. Harry continues to love and respect Dumbledore, and accept his authority, despite disagreeing with him more and more. Dumbledore loves Harry and requires much of him, but keeps crucial information from him. Snape loathes Harry, yet protected him from Quirrel. And, best of all, Harry feels happy and safe at Hogwarts - where there are moving staircases, missing steps, trolls in the dungeon, a malicious poltergeist, Fred and George, Draco Malfoy, quidditch, Fluffy, Voldemort and Tom Riddle, a basilisk, Dolores Umbridge, dementors, Death Eaters, werewolves, and the Forbidden Forest next door!
Second Half
Duality and the Reader
The effect of all these dualities is that just about everything and everyone in Rowling’s magical world is open to question - and to interpretation, and to change. There seems to be nothing that we readers can solidly and continually depend on in our quest to understand the story, which is frustrating (not to say frightening) but liberating too. It’s what causes some of us to sympathise with the Slytherins and frown upon the Gryffindors! This doubt and uncertainty about people, ideas, events is perhaps surprising in a children’s story about good and evil, but it is a truth that every reader can recognise from their own experience in their own world. A glance at the news or a consideration of oneself, one’s family, one’s friends are all it takes to understand that right and wrong, good and bad, serious and comic are neither immutable nor neatly separated. Things are no different in Rowling’s magical world.
Duality and Choice
The uncertainty of the magical world ties in with Dumbledore’s statement in CoS that “It is our choices … that show what we truly are”: if this is so, what we are changes with each choice. Dumbledore talks about choice further in HBP when he tells Harry, “You are setting too much store by the prophecy!” Voldemort was not required to act on the prophecy, he chose to act, and he chose how. Harry can choose too. There are limits to Harry’s choice, or to the power of his choice, as Dumbledore acknowledges, because Voldemort seems set on killing him, but the choice is there. Merope’s story shows the power an individual has to forge his or her own destiny, and its limits too. Merope defied her upbringing to act on her love for Tom Riddle, then gambled on Riddle’s affection and lost, and was destroyed by the loss. Draco accepting Voldemort’s task of killing Dumbledore shows how complex choice can be. A mess of fear, love and ambition are what moved him, and it’s hard to say which impulse was strongest, or which caused him to hesitate at the last moment.
There is also in HP, among the double-natured creatures, a suggestion that the power to choose - that is, free will - is not only stronger than “our abilities” but stronger than what might be considered our natures. Fred and George are twins; so are Parvati and Padma. Fred and George are inseparable and both in Gryffindor; Parvati and Padma are independent of each other, one in Gryffindor, one in Ravenclaw. There are two werewolves; Lupin has chosen to be human, Greyback to be a monstrous wolf. The story takes this notion even further, however. One of the dualities set up in the story is that of the elves and the centaurs. Elves delight in serving wizards and subjugate themselves to their wizard masters so far as to seek punishment or to punish themselves if they fall short in their duty. Centaurs hold themselves proudly aloof from wizards, and such is their horror of subjugation they will not help wizards even in dire need. Both Dobby and Firenze make conscious decisions to break through the limits that supposedly define them. Dobby disobeys his master to warn Harry, and embraces freedom; Firenze protects Harry, even allowing him to sit on his back, and leaves the Forest in order to help Dumbledore. This notion, that each of us is what he or she chooses to be, is important for our understanding of Harry and Voldemort. Readers have tried to explain them, their differences and their similarities, by reference to their backgrounds and upbringing, but not convincingly. In the end Harry and Voldemort are not explicable. Each of them is as he is because that is what he chooses.
If one accepts the notion of free will, of choice, it is a great liberation. One quickly recognises, however, that it is also a necessity, a duty even, because if one does not choose, the choice is made for one. The failure to choose is, perhaps, what is at the heart of Severus Snape. Snape is the servant of two masters, though he seems happy with neither. In HBP when Harry calls him a coward, Snape is described as looking as though he is in as much pain as Fang, “stuck in the burning house”. Is this not the essence of Snape, that he sees himself as trapped, as having no choice? For sixteen years he can’t even get the job he wants! He is hemmed in - from the past by his father’s brutality, and James’s and Sirius’s mockery, in the present by Dumbledore’s authority and Voldemort’s power. In HBP Hagrid, in the Forest, overhears him grumbling under the one, and we, in his first Defence lesson, hear him expressing his awe of the other. In the Astronomy Tower Snape is forced by circumstances to kill Dumbledore - or that’s how he sees it. But as he flees from Hogwarts he realises that in failing to choose Dumbledore in that crucial moment, he has pledged himself to Voldemort. Harry’s accusation of cowardice enrages and distresses him precisely because he knows it’s true.
Duality and Alchemy
There can be no doubt that HP is an alchemical story. The title of the first book was the first enormous clue to this, and it is confirmed when the Mirror of Erised shows Harry’s heart’s desire to be to find the philosopher’s stone. Alchemical imagery runs through the entire series. All of the following are grounded in alchemy: James and Lily dying and Harry living, Hogwarts, the stone, the golden snitch, lion and dragon, Dumbledore’s phoenix, the names Black, Albus and Rubeus, Ron and Hermione, Neville’s toad and Umbridge’s toad-like appearance, the golden egg in GoF, Harry in the bath in GoF, Luna, Greyback, Harry and Draco’s fight in the bathroom… and there are plenty more.
The aim of the alchemist and the purpose of alchemy is the creation of the philosopher’s stone, which gives eternal life and turns base matter into gold. In alchemy there is no separation between the spiritual and the material, so that in creating the stone and transforming base matter into gold, the alchemist transforms his understanding into spiritual gold - enlightenment, understanding that transcends birth and death - that is, eternal life. Creating the philosopher’s stone and attaining this understanding are the same thing, the one brings about the other and vice versa. In HP Harry’s dual goal is to understand himself and to vanquish Voldemort. Neither is possible without the other.
Although material and spiritual are one in alchemy, alchemy is beset by duality. It is a quest for truth that in the wrong hands is merely a swindler’s con-trick. It is a search for knowledge and understanding that can also be the vain pursuit of wealth and immortality. And alchemy is itself concerned with duality. The philosopher’s stone is created by achieving a balance of two opposite elements, sulphur and mercury. Sulphur, also called Sol (sun), is hot and dry; mercury, also called Luna (moon), is cold and wet. Between them sulphur and mercury, as they contain the four elements - fire, water, earth and air - call to mind the four houses of Hogwarts, and the opposition of Gryffindor and Slytherin: the Gryffindor dormitory is a high tower and its focus is a fireplace (fire and air); the Slytherin dormitory is a deep dungeon and lies beneath the lake (earth and water). In OotP the Sorting Hat makes a plea for unity among the Hogwarts houses as essential against the threat of Voldemort, just as the alchemist works to unite sulphur and mercury to make the stone.
To deter those motivated by material gain alchemical texts are deliberately obscure and contradictory, and employ fantastical imagery and images. In HP the rumbustious comedy of life at Hogwarts obscures and contradicts Harry’s struggle to overcome Voldemort. But the images and imagery of alchemy are a joy, and so is the comedy of Hogwarts, and one would hate to lose it or to see Harry lose it, he loves it so much! The unity the alchemist seeks and Hogwarts needs, then, is not a reduction that rejects variety and complexity but an expansion that embraces them. At Hogwarts - and for Harry himself - the expansion needed is the inclusion of Slytherin. OotP saw a unity of the other three houses in the DA, and it was through excluded Slytherin that Voldemort’s followers entered the school in HBP. Harry is a bridge between Gryffindor and Slytherin. He may be “a true Gryffindor”, but the Sorting Hat thought of putting him in Slytherin, and he does have green eyes and a silver invisibility cloak! And in PS, before the sorting, we see him caught in the middle of the rivalry between Draco and Ron, his friendship desired by both.
To describe the goings-on at Hogwarts as comedy is not to belittle them. Hogwarts, with all its splendour, mischief, unfairness, absurdity, horror and fun, represents the world, and it is wonderful that Harry is happy there, that he loves it and wants to be part of it. At Hogwarts Harry learns from his teachers and from his schoolmates not only how to fight Voldemort but how to live in the world. Why else should Harry try so hard to understand himself and vanquish Voldemort if not so he can live happily ever after?! He is like the alchemist, who in working to create the philosopher’s stone works to understand himself and the world, and not like Voldemort, running after an illusion, or Snape, trapped in a prison of his own making.
Duality and the End of the Story
If, for the alchemist, the greatest duality is birth and death, then for the writer, it is beginning and end. The end of a story always, to some extent, resolves the questions posed by the beginning, but the perfect resolution - alchemically speaking - is for the story to end at the beginning. Most of what we long to know in HP has been a mystery since the beginning. What exactly happened at Godric’s Hollow on 31 October 1981? Who was there? Why did Lily not need to die? Why did her death destroy Voldemort and protect Harry from him? What is the meaning of Harry’s scar? Was Snape there? Whose side was he on? Why did Dumbledore trust him? The questions are at the beginning of the story, and the answers are there too, so that’s where Harry must go to find them, and that’s where the story will end, at the beginning. Readers may recall that, when Harry looked into the Mirror of Erised in PS he did not, in fact, see himself finding the philosopher’s stone, he saw that he already had it.