Deathly Hallows: Page 738
An argument about accidents, the dubious nature of Harry's Lily-magic, Harry's confidence glow-up, and a World War I-type truce between onlookers.
Hello! It’s the afternoon instead of the morning, but that’s okay. Today we cover page 738 of Deathly Hallows: a pivotal page in the Harry/Voldemort showdown that’s mostly talking, but very important talking. There’s a lot of talking in Harry Potter, especially since even the weaponry is mostly triggered by talking. But don’t let me get off-topic. Enjoy!
Page 738 of Deathly Hallows is packed with important information. We’re nearing the end of the book and things are speeding up, and it’s as if all of a sudden, J.K. Rowling realized she actually needed to finish things. Harry and Voldemort are circling each other, each not quite sure what the other is doing, and Harry is explaining how Voldemort’s grand plan has failed.
“Accident, was it, when my mother died to save me?” he says as the page begins. “Accident, when I decided to fight in that graveyard? Accident, that I didn’t defend myself tonight, and survived, and returned to fight again?”
Accident? I mean, sort of. Lily dying while protecting Harry wasn’t quite an accident, and Harry declining to fight against Voldemort definitely wasn’t an accident...but in the graveyard, Harry deciding to fight probably was. It wasn’t exactly an accident per se, but it’s not like Harry was thinking to himself, “this will pay off big time in a few years!” It’s just something he did in the moment because he wanted to survive. It’s like — stop me if you’ve heard this before — that episode of The Office when Oscar says “it’s just a coincidence. Not even. It’s just a thing that happened.”
Voldemort, of course, responds that they actually were accidents. At this point, the pair is sort of getting derailed from their actual magical showdown; the crowd is waiting, barely breathing, for one wizard to attack the other, and instead they’re shouting at each other about the semantic connotations of the word “accident.” The crowd is watching, in fact, “frozen as if Petrified” — why is “Petrified” capitalized? — and “nobody seemed to breathe but they two.”
“Accidents!” Voldemort shouts. “Accidents and chance and the fact that you crouched and sniveled behind the skirts of greater men and women, and permitted me to kill them for you!”
Here’s what’s happening here: Voldemort and Harry are completely talking past each other. It’s like when you’re arguing about the electoral college, and one person keeps saying something like “each state has its own distinct cultural identity,” not realizing that the problem isn’t that I don’t know that each state has its own distinct cultural identity; I just think it’s irrelevant and really don’t care.
Voldemort is trying to convince Harry — and himself — that he (Voldemort) is the better wizard. That’s undeniably true, even though Voldemort, based on how hard he’s arguing, seems shaken. Harry, meanwhile, is trying to make Voldemort understand that he hasn’t survived by accident; he’s survived because he has friends and love and teamwork and planning and all that. They’re using the same terminology to make completely different arguments — “accidents!” — but they’re not saying the same thing. Harry already knows that Voldemort is a way better wizard than he is; he just thinks it’s irrelevant and really doesn’t care.
Harry stares into Voldemort’s eyes. “You won’t be killing anyone else tonight,” he says. “You won’t be able to kill any of them ever again. Don’t you get it? I was ready to die to stop you from killing these people —”
Here, finally, the whole series comes full circle. Harry has done what Lily did for him, sacrificing himself (albeit unsuccessfully) to save others, thus providing them with the most powerful magical protection that exists. Just like, for a long time, Voldemort couldn’t harm Harry, he now can’t harm any of the people for whom Harry died.
I have just a few questions.
I mean honestly, this just can’t be how it works. Harry surrenders himself to Voldemort...and then Voldemort just can’t hurt any of those people ever again? When Lily sacrificed herself to save Harry, it wasn’t calculated: she didn’t think to herself “okay, if he kills me, then Harry will be fine!” She died because she was trying to save Harry. She refused to hand him over, but barricaded the door and stood between Voldemort and her child in a futile attempt to protect him. What Harry has done is completely different: he’s basically gone up to Voldemort and said “okay, time to kill me!” Sure, he sacrificed himself because he wanted to end the fighting, but he didn’t die in the act of protecting someone else.
This is a long way of saying that if all it takes to protect large populations (i.e. the entire remaining population of Hogwarts) is a single person willing to die for them, that’s a major source of protection that isn’t being utilized. Look at Fantastic Beasts. Let’s assume, for the sake of simplicity, that Grindelwald just wants to kill all the muggles, no questions asked. Doesn’t this scene mean that all it would take to protect all the muggles in the world is a single wizard coming up to Grindelwald and saying “kill me instead!”?
Sure, there’s some nuance there — the person being sacrificed would actually have to mean it, for one, but there are ways around that; find a terminally ill wizard who wants to do one last good deed or something — but it still seems like too easy a way to protect enormous numbers of people. By sacrificing himself, Harry has basically neutered Voldemort. If he casts Avada Kedavra at Professor McGonagall, what will happen? Fortunately, we don’t know, but there’s a very real possibility that it would just do nothing.
“We don’t know” is actually doing a lot of work here, because we don’t know how much Harry actually knows, how much he’s rightly or wrongly assuming, how much is barely-educated guessing, and how much is just him saying things to keep Voldemort off his rhythm. Has the magic that Harry is describing actually worked? Maybe, but we really can’t say. If it has, it’s safe to say that it’s working only to a lesser extent than Harry’s protection from Lily did. Voldemort can still cast spells on the assembled crowd; they just don’t last forever. Maybe he can’t kill them, but as we’ll see later in his duel with McGonagall, Slughorn, and Kingsley, he can still harm them. That seems like the most likely outcome: that Harry’s sacrifice wasn’t as direct, so it’s not as protective, but there’s still a level of magical protection going on. What this also might mean is that Voldemort can no longer just cast Avada Kedavra on people — it’ll blast his soul apart the way baby Harry did — so instead he has to come up with creative alternatives: vanishing the floor beneath people’s feet, setting people on fire, summoning anvils falling directly above their heads, etc. Now I’m picturing Harry Potter as an old-fashioned WB cartoon, and I can’t get enough of it. Incredible how, with all these possibilities, we’re still so far away from any kind of Harry Potter TV show.
The key to understanding this magic is where the line is. After Voldemort insists that Harry didn’t actually die, Harry responds: “I meant to, and that’s what did it. I’ve done what my mother did. They’re protected from you. What this tells us is that A) Harry is doing this based on his understanding of what his mother did, not any inside information from Dumbledore or anywhere else, and B) at least based on Harry’s understanding of the magic, both what he did and what Lily did cross the same threshold. So basically, the way Harry understands it, as long as you sacrifice yourself in service of protecting someone or something, that someone or something is protected. You don’t have to die in the thick of battle, actively protecting someone else; if the death itself is the protection, that counts too. At least, that’s what Harry thinks.
“You don’t learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?” Harry asks.
This scene, even without the magic involved, is maybe Harry’s most impressive scene of the series. Harry is out-talking Lord Voldemort about magic. It’s a huge gamble for him to take: what if Voldemort just says “no, that’s not how it works”? He’s also calling Voldemort “Riddle,” which seems like both a way to expose his humanity in front of the crowd and a good strategy for making him even more angry and further screwing up his decision-making process, as we’ve addressed in this newsletter before. A lot of people who are watching this showdown, on the other hand, probably have no idea what in the world Harry is talking about. Voldemort’s ancestry is a secret. That’s easy to forget because we’re privy to so much inside information as readers, but a lot of everyday wizards, and even some pretty main characters — Malfoy? Kingsley? — don’t know anything about Voldemort’s history. “Riddle?” they’re thinking. “What the hell is he talking about?”
The page suddenly gets into Bond-type exposition, the classic moment when the villain explains his entire plan...except this time, it’s the hero who’s explaining. “I know things you don’t know, Tom Riddle,” Harry says. “I know lots of important things that you don’t. Want to hear some, before you make another big mistake?”
Where is this newfound confidence coming from? Harry is suddenly a rock-star public speaker, going toe-to-toe with Voldemort without a flicker of nervousness. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s seen what death looks like and isn’t worried about it anymore, or maybe he’s genuinely confident that the plan he’s set in motion has worked and he has nothing to fear from Voldemort. Either way, we’ve come a long, long way, since two years earlier. Remember the ministry? Voldemort comes in and sees Harry and Bellatrix, and Harry is stupefied, not by the spell but by Voldemort’s mere appearance. Now he’s walking around without a care in the world. He might as well be Matthew McConaughey in The Lincoln Lawyer.
Maybe it’s a vindication of Dumbledore’s theory of fear: it’s not death or darkness that people fear, but the unknown, and now that Harry knows everything that’s going on, he’s not afraid anymore. Of course, this sort of casts a pall over Dumbledore’s decision to withhold all the information that Harry needed for several books, because who knows what he could have accomplished if he was more confident and less afraid...but still, Harry has become a rock star. Imagine being Hermione and knowing all the stupid things that Harry has done as recently as a few hours ago, and now seeing this. It could be jarring, like if I saw my best friend from pre-k on TV playing electric guitar and doing the moonwalk. Also saving the world from an evil dark wizard. Big change of pace.
Voldemort, on encountering Harry’s new confidence, doesn’t speak; he prowls in a circle. “Harry knew that he kept him temporarily mesmerized and at bay,” Rowling writes. As much as I’ve said about Harry’s confidence, Voldemort is also notable here for his lack thereof. This guy is acknowledged even by his enemies as one of the greatest wizards ever to exist, but his lack of self-esteem is now coming out for all the world to see. For what it’s worth, the lack of self-esteem is justified, since it’s about to turn out that he’s been wrong about pretty much everything. But it’s surprising that Voldemort is so entranced by the mind games that Harry is playing with him; so unsure of himself that rather than shouting “Avada Kedavra” and finishing the job, he actually stops and listens to what Harry has to say.
The observers on both sides have reached a weird sort of equilibrium, where everyone is content to just watch Harry and Voldemort do battle rather than doing anything themselves. It actually makes sense: their fight is basically a proxy for the larger war. Whoever wins, their side is clearly going to win. And let’s face it; both sides want to watch the fight. It’s sort of like the scene in the Brain room in the Department of Mysteries, or that story from World War I about the soldiers declaring a truce on Christmas to play soccer. And interestingly enough, just like the observers, that’s what the reader is doing: they’re so caught up in the secrets that Harry is finally revealing that they don’t even mind, at least for a little while, that the action hasn’t happened yet.
For that big final fight, we’ll have to wait a little bit longer. For the moment, ironically enough, we find ourselves in the same position as all those besides Harry and Voldemort. It’s a strange situation to be in, as a reader, but it’s just a coincidence. Not even. It’s just a thing that happened.