The case for Harry Potter in the classics

I wrote this essay for a writing class I took this year. It is modeled (as the assignment required) loosely on Plato's The Apology. There are some sentences that need rephrasing, some points that need more emphasis, etc. bu on the whole I'm quite proud of it. Then again, I'm biased - so please look into this and see if you can find any faults. Thanks <3

The Case for Harry Potter in the classics

By lunahlove

The Harry Potter books are little more than childrens’ tales. They are a fantasy thought up by a woman who had too little money and too much spare time, and their sole purpose is to entertain. Reading them means you will have enjoyed a good story, if even that, and nothing more.

"Harry,” [Dumbledore pleaded, a mere hour after the murder of Harry’s last wizarding relative, Sirius Black], “suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human-"

"THEN-I-DON'T-WANT-TO-BE-HUMAN!" Harry roared.

- p. 824, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

This is the kind of suffering far beyond anything found in a children’s tale. This is a kind of suffering that has been felt throughout the history of mankind, expressed in modern-day speech through the eyes of one of the most well-written Christ figures in modern history. The Harry Potter series gives a remarkable and powerful insight into the human nature, and should be labeled as nothing less than great literature.

The most common criticism of Harry Potter – and the one that I would like to argue against – is that it is a simple children’s book. According to the critics, Harry Potter is neither insightful nor weighty in topic – but it is. Harry Potter draws from Macbeth the concept of free will, from The Iliad the act of rescuing Cedric Diggory’s dead body, from King Arthur the stories of a young hero with a powerful and intelligent mentor, and most importantly, from The Bible the very characters of Harry Potter and Dumbledore themselves. Harry Potter deals with themes as weight as love, the loss of innocence, and the damage and loss of the soul.

One of the most insightful questions in history comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth – had Macbeth never heard the prophecy, would it have come true? Had Macbeth not killed the king, would he have become king himself? Macbeth is not, however, the only character to struggle with such a difficult question. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry is informed of a prophecy made months before his birth.

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches...Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies...and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not...and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives...."

Lord Voldemort, the villain in Harry Potter, heard only a part of the prophecy – the first two lines – and acted accordingly. However, he never heard the rest of the prophecy, that which says that the one he marks as his equal will have a power he knows not. Though not implicitly stated, the prophecy heavily implies that through the act of marking Harry as his equal, he gave Harry a power he had no idea about. Because Voldemort acted on the part of the prophecy he heard, he set in motion a series of events that would lead to his ultimate downfall. What’s more, even after the prophecy had been set in motion, it was still not set in stone. After Harry asks Dumbledore if he has ‘got to’ follow the prophecy, Dumbledore replies “Got to? Of course you’ve got to! But not because of the prophecy! Because you, yourself, will never rest until you’ve tried… Imagine, please, just for a moment, that you had never heard of the prophecy! How would you feel about Voldemort now!” Harry responds, after a moment: “I’d want him finished. And I’d want to do it.” Harry Potter chose, by his own free will, to kill Voldemort regardless of the prophecy. And what’s more, Harry chose to do it out of love, the very power Dumbledore says is the one that Voldemort has unwittingly given Harry, through the act of murdering his parents.

Love, the theme in Harry Potter that squeezes itself in over and over again. It is love that drives Harry with the passion to bring down the most powerful dark wizard in the world, because Harry knows the power Voldemort is capable of. There are precious few more people left in Harry’s life to lose by the time he approaches the final battle with Voldemort, but Harry fights anyway. He knows very well that if he does not fight, then he will not be the last life that Voldemort has ripped apart. If he does not fight, then Voldemort, who has taken away every chance he had at a family, who has killed every father figure Harry ever had, will win. In the name of his mother, father, godfather and mentor, Harry fights until the very end, and even at that final moment, Harry offers Voldemort a chance for redemption. Even when the final spells are cast, Harry uses not the Killing Curse that Voldemort has been so fond of, but ‘Expelliarmus’ – the disarming spell. Even then, Harry does not fight to kill.

Harry retained his innocence throughout the story by never killing, an innocence that Voldemort twisted, brutalized, ripped apart, and finally lost when he attempted to murder a year-old baby. In Harry Potter there is a kind of dark magic so horrifically evil it is taboo to even speak of it. In Harry Potter, the act of murdering a person does something more than take a life – the soul of the murderer is ripped apart. The hocrux is a magic that takes the ripped soul and stores it in an object, thus making you less mortal than you otherwise would be. With the soul ripped apart, one cannot die as long as one piece of their soul is kept intact. Voldemort used the hocrux in his goal to achieve immortality – in fact, he went far beyond any other wizard in history, making a grand total of seven hocruxes. To rip the soul apart into seven pieces is an absolute atrocity in Harry Potter, and its effects on Voldemort become apparent, as with each new hocrux he makes, his appearance becomes less and less human, changing from a handsome young man to a creature with grey skin, red cat-like eyes and slits for nostrils. When Voldemort killed Harry, his already weak and unstable soul finally ‘collapsed’ on itself, and represented itself through the form of a mangled and ugly baby. The part of the soul that he lost was his innocence. There are more ways one can lose the soul in Harry Potter – a dementor can perform the Dementor’s Kiss, sucking your soul out and leaving you an empty shell with no thoughts and memories – but none are so twisted as the hocrux.

All of this was explained to Harry – and the reader – in chapter 35 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The chapter, however, does much more than reveal the truth behind why Harry's life was so difficult - it also provides an ultimate realization for the reader of the most important influence in the entirety of the Harry Potter series. Through this chapter the reader comes to realize that the series draws from the most famous writing in history -the Holy Bible. The character of Dumbledore is presented as virtually all-knowing, recognized as the most powerful wizard alive - in other words, Dumbledore represents God himself. Harry Potter thus becomes Jesus Christ, calling himself 'Dumbledore's (God's) man through and through)' and by offering his life to Voldemort when he thought it was the only option left to kill Voldemort. And like Jesus Christ, Harry's sacrifice is short-lived - after a limbo in chapter 35 (which, notably, is titled 'King's Cross' - both the name of the location and a reference to Harry's Jesus-figure status), Harry is 'resurrected', where he returns to battle and ultimately kill Voldemort.

But the similarities between Harry Potter and the Holy Bible do not end there. Just before the final battle, Harry offers Voldemort one last chance at remorse - the only way for Voldemort to merge his soul once more. He offers Voldemort the chance to redeem himself, by feeling true remorse for the sins he has committed. When Voldemort refuses, he seals his fate, ultimately killing himself.

There is a great irony in the death of Voldemort. Throughout the books, Dumbledore (once again, the God figure) insists that death is not something to be feared. "To the well-organized mind," he says in the first book, "death is but the next great adventure." In Harry Potter, death too is a theme that connects it to a spiritual interpretation, for it is made very clear, time and time again, that there is an after-life, and it is nothing to fear. "It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more," Dumbledore tells Harry. His message is clear: death is not a curse. But Voldemort has a very different opinion, directly contradicting Dumbledore by saying "There is nothing worse than death!" He spends a lifetime murdering in effort to gain immortality (through the hocruxes), always attempting to cheat death. Despite Dumbledore's insistence that there are worse things than death, Voldemort refuses to accept this, and in the end, he gets his own ultimate punishment. Through this relationship Harry Potter offers something that should be found in any classic - a theme to be explored and understood.

The fate of Harry Potter should be sealed by now. Through the course of seven books and over four thousand pages, Harry Potter has proven time and time again that it contains in its pages a kind of truth in human nature unmatched by any other modern novels. It is a weighty novel, despite the fact that it is accessible to a large portion of the population. Magic does not make it a children's tale, and easy language does not make it simple. The contents of its fantastical pages have well earned enough merit to place themselves on the shelf beside Macbeth and Hamlet, and it's high time the world acknowledges this.