Spoiler Alert: Harry Potter’s a Wizard!
Chapter 4: Keeper of the Keys
Introducing Harry Potter, the most well-adjusted 11-year-old imaginable. “Oh, so you say I’m a wizard? And I’m famous? And my parents were killed by a powerful evil wizard who tried to kill me? Gee wiz!”
Harry’s not really scared of the hairy giant breaking into the shack. He doesn’t have an existential crisis when he discovers that not only are there wizards, but he is one. His biggest complaint is that his Aunt and Uncle never told him of his special powers. That’s it. That’s his major concern.
He’s one resilient little bugger, isn’t he?
But I guess the complete breakdown doesn’t come around until Order of the Phoenix (so much angst!).
And how about Hagrid? I completely blew past the fact that he was expelled when I first read this book. It wasn’t until Chamber of Secrets that I actually computed it. Scattered details everywhere!
Chapter 5: Diagon Alley
Gringotts! The emphasis placed on “DO NOT ROB GRINGOTTS” really cannot be truly appreciated until Deathly Hallows. But when you get to that point, well…! It’s quite the throwback.
And Griphook! He was another one of those characters I completely tossed away in the beginning as unimportant to the overall story. Just an extra, nothing more. I made that mistake a lot in this series.
We’re also introduced to Draco in this chapter, a character we are clearly meant to sympathize with and like. He’s so cordial! Someone never read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Expressing blatant judgmental views to stranger isn’t exactly how one makes a good first impression.
And of course, there’s the wand. The connection between Harry’s wand and Voldemort’s wand is massive foreshadowing, and you get that impression when you read it. You just don’t realize how much foreshadowing we’re talking. The fact that the entire ending hinges on these wands is not evident at this point.
I don’t know why I thought we met Hermione or Ron in this chapter. But I was confusing this book with Chamber of Secrets, when they all see Lockhart in the bookstore.
It’s interesting to try and look forward to the insanity of the later books from the innocent perspective of this first one. There is seemingly no indication of the turn this series is going to take. You think it’s going to be light and sweet and then BAM! Mass wizard genocide.
But we’re not there yet. We’re not even at Hogwarts yet. We have a ways to go…quite a ways…
I hadn’t re-read the first book in forever, and I started laughing when they started talking about Gringotts, laughing at JK Rowling’s pure obsessive attention to detail. I mean, Hagrid even says there are dragons guarding some of the vaults! I think that’s the kind of thing that shows that not only did JK Rowling plan everything out in freakish detail, but she clearly intended the series to be read more than once, because there is no way you’d know that some of that stuff would turn out to be more than colorful details the first time around.
As for Harry accepting everything…well, kids accept a lot of extraordinary things. His Muggle life doesn’t have much going for it. It’s the childhood dream of running away to a cooler world where you have more agency. And, as I think we were talking about a few posts ago, it’s an explanation for all the weird things that have been happening around him. I think it would be somewhat of a relief.
Wow, I made the same mistake, expecting to meet Ron and Hermione in Diagon Alley.
True, Harry’s most obvious angst won’t show up for a while, but while he is pretty well adjusted for all the troubles he’s had to face so far, there are things that worry him: First, that it is just a dream and that he would wake up and find out that it wasn’t really true that he had a giant for a best buddy, and second, that since he knows so little about the wizarding world he will be hopelessly trying to catch up to all his peers.
We have also been introduced to trust here. Hagrid is trusted by Dumbledore to retrieve the important little package from vault 713, and he was trusted with Harry, both to deliver him to the Dursleys as a baby and to get him on the way to Hogwarts now he is 11. Harry trusts him because he looked in his eyes and saw they were “crinkled in a smile.” That is very consistent with what Harry does: He determines the mood and nature of people by “reading” their body language.
Then he meets Draco, who in terms of size is more like Harry than Dudley, but he draws the conclusion that Draco is like his cousin because of his bullying attitude.
The issues of prejudice were brought up from the start with the Dursleys wishing to stamp out the magic or at least deny its existence. Now it is Draco that is talking about excluding those “who haven’t grown up in wizarding families” from attending Hogwarts. Then there is the subtle prejudice against Slytherin expressed by the half-giant that we have come to trust, as he says: “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin.” (Which we will discover is quite untrue. Even at this point, they think former Gryffendor Sirius Black had turned traitor, when it was really the deed of former Gryffendor Peter Pettigrew. And some of our greatest heros, like Severus Snape and Regulus Black were in Slytherin.)
Yes, there is the huge foreshadowing with the wandlore regarding the twin cores between Harry’s wand and Voldemort’s, but also the beginning of learning how important it is that “the wand chooses the wizard.” And we will learn that some who are in the old wizarding families didn’t get to go to Ollivanders for a new wand that would choose them and be truly theirs. When Harry meets Ron he finds out that Ron has “Charlie’s old wand” among other hand-me-downs. Neville also had an heirloom wand (his dad’s?) that was broken during the fight at the ministry in their 5th year. It seems like Seamus must not have had his ‘own’ wand either, but I can’t remember any hints in the books about that.
Harry has lived all his life with the Dursleys. He despises them. The first chance he has, even if it feels dreamlike, to leave them, he just grabs it. It makes perfect sense in my opinion, since I believe it felt right to him, magic you see. He was told by those same fools he hates that it was impossible, so the obvious thing is to trust whoever says different. He’s 10, he’s done things unexplainable, he’s chained down by his relatives. Everyone would believe in those circumstances, without a fuss. That argument is invalid, in my opinion, of course.
Flight from being despised to being liked? from being starved to being well-fed? (One of my favorite parts of PS/SS is the banquet on Harry’s arrival, where he gets to eat anything he wants, and in any quantity he wants.)
Harry didn’t know about the food when he left for Platform 9 3/4, of course, but I didn’t really have to suspend belief to get into this part of the story. The power of being treated kindly could do that to a 10-year-old.