OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Quite some time ago, Cindy wrote:

Oh, I think there is one character even less sympathetic than Karkaroff, who has at least reformed himself into a headmaster of a school. Pettigrew is worse, IMHO.

Aw. Poor widdle Peter. Can't you cut him some slack, Cindy? I mean, what's he ever really done—other than betraying all of his friends, facilitating the return of Voldemort, abducting Bertha Jorkins and aiding in her torment and death, and murdering 12 anonymous Muggles and poor Cedric Diggory, that is? I mean, hey. We all make mistakes, right?

Heh. No, you're right. Pettigrew's seriously bad news. But I still find him more sympathetic than Karkaroff somehow. Maybe that's because Karkaroff still has some pride. He's smug and preening and sleek and vain, he vacillates between smarming up to Dumbledore and snarling accusations at him, he's mean to his students (with the exception of Victor), and his solicitousness to Victor...well, maybe that was just me. Was I the only one left with the unsettling suspicion that Karkaroff's relationship with Victor might have been neither purely pedagogical nor purely platonic—and almost certainly not purely consensual?

OK. So maybe I just have a very sick mind.

But even leaving aside for the moment the question of inappropriate relations between Karkaroff and his pet pupil, there still wasn't very much there to garner my sympathies—until he starting reacting to the reappearance of the Dark Mark, that is, at which point he did start to rack up some sympathy points with me. I sympathize readily with desperation, and with people trapped in no-win situations.

Pettigrew, on the other hand...well, every time we see the poor wretch, he's in some state of utter abjection. If he isn't grovelling for his life, then he's weeping in helpless terror at his impending death at the hands of his old classmates, or he's cringing in fear and revulsion from his Evil Undead Baby Master, or he's screaming or sobbing or moaning in physical agony. He's a broken man; his life is just one long unending misery; I don't believe that he's enjoyed a single moment of happiness or pleasure or even real contentment since the first day he joined Voldemort's cause. Even as a rat, he seemed profoundly depressed. ("Sleep...eat...sleep...eat...")

And, yeah. That does make him somewhat sympathetic. To my way of thinking, at least.

But then, given that Cindy's admitted that she values toughness highly and identifies with it, while feeling little but contempt for vulnerability and frailty, I strongly suspect that this is precisely what makes Pettigrew her candidate for Least Sympathetic Character.

And then there's also the squeamishness issue. Cindy, again:

Wormtail? He's one of the few characters who we know doesn't like to kill people or see people killed, although he did what he had to do when he blasted all those Muggles on the street. That assessment is based on Wormtail's reluctance to curse/kill someone in GoF, and his unwillingness to look Harry in the eye in the graveyard.

Agreed. Although he is capable of killing without even a moment's hesitation. He doesn't balk for so much as a second before offing Cedric Diggory in the graveyard, and he couldn't have pulled off his snookering of poor Sirius if he'd messed up the timing on the muggle-blasting stunt. He may not care much for it, but he doesn't falter.

But I would agree that he doesn't like it very much. And again, I suspect that this probably acts as a black mark in Cindy's books, while it's rather a sympathy point in mine. Although I do feel a certain degree of contempt for the hypocrisy displayed by those who condone killing while being themselves unwilling to get their hands dirty, it still makes me think better of people when they seem squeamish about it. I don't like killing.

Cindy wrote:

Anyway, I don't think that there are that many characters in the series who are squeamish about killing people.

I think that this is an important observation, and one that strikes to the heart of a number of the topics I've brought up here recently: Where the Bleeding Hearts?, for example, or my discomfort with the idea of the equation of weakness and wickedness.

I very much liked Barb's observation that the most Bleeding Heartish character we've seen so far is Hermione, as well as her suggestion that this might have a lot to do with the fact that Hermione is muggle-born and thus out of step with wizarding culture as a whole. I agree with her entirely. Wizarding culture is not our own, and it differs in ways that run far deeper than a mere reliance on magic over technology.

The wizarding culture of the books strikes me as one that retains much stronger traces of Warrior Ethos than our own does. Wizards seem for the most part decidedly un-squeamish about killing, or indeed, about violence in general. Students at Hogwarts are exposed as a matter of due course to a degree of physical risk that strikes many readers (it would seem) as excessive or even horrifying, and they are expected to learn to handle this with aplomb. Timidity is only marginally better tolerated by the teachers than it is by the students themselves (far less so in Snape's case, but even the generally humanistic McGonagall has very little tolerance for it); cowardice is simply and purely and completely loathed.

The pureblooders' emphasis on the concept of "wizarding pride" is also telling, to my mind, as is the fact that duelling is still a common enough practice for it to be taught as an extracurricular option at Hogwarts. Pride—and a particular kind of pride at that, a combatative pride—is evident throughout the books as a trait on which the culture as a whole places a high degree of emphasis.

It's always struck me as amusing—amusing and also kind of sad, really—that the Slytherins seem to ascribe to this ethos very nearly as closely as the Gryffyndors do. They're supposed to value cunning and deceit, and achievement through any means possible, and all of that, right? They're supposed to value sneakiness. They're supposed to value the ends over the means. So why on earth should they care about things like warrior pride, or physical courage, or dignitas, or in-group loyalty?

But they do. They care about all of that a great deal. We see it with Voldie and his Death Eaters, and we see a lot of it with Draco Malfoy. Accused of having bought his way onto the Quiddich team, Draco actually loses his temper. If he's such a good little Slyth boy, then shouldn't he have simply smirked? After all, isn't that just the sort of practice that he's supposed to be engaged in? Finding the underhanded way to get things for himself? Exploiting a situation by any means possible? Really, he should be taking pride in his utterly House-sanctioned behavior. But he's not. He's ashamed. And he doesn't like being accused of cowardice, either. And he feels honor-bound to avenge insults against his mother's name. And...

And, well, it's all just plain sad, if you ask me. The poor Slyths just can't win: their House emphasizes the very values that their overall culture most strongly militates against. No matter how many times they may win the House Cup, no matter how loudly and shrilly they may proclaim their superiority by virtue of blood or money, no matter how successful their Old Boys may have been at attaining positions of power and prestige, the fact still remains that they're losers by cultural default, and they know it. Small wonder that they're so prone to envy and resentment, or that Evil Powers find them so very easy to corrupt and to seduce.

By the way, Lupin and Sirius really weren't thinking all that straight in the Shrieking Shack. If I felt I had to dispatch another human being in cold blood while that person begged for his life with three 13-year old kids standing around watching, I'd ask the kids to go stand in the hall.

You would think. But if wizarding culture really does adhere to a fairly strong warrior ethic, then maybe it wouldn't particularly occur to Sirius and Lupin. After all, the kids are wizards-in-training. They're expected to be pretty tough.

And, of course, Ron couldn't walk.

But yeah, I agree that if they'd been thinking more clearly, they probably would have at least tried to send the kids out of the room.

—Elkins