Cindy confessed to getting a little paranoid about who might be a DE.
Eloise wrote:
That's OK, Cindy. It was precisely for people like you ( and me) that I proposed the Order of the Flying Hedgehog. As I've said before, I think paranoia at this point of the game is a reasonable response. Seriously. I do. If JKR's doing her job, then we should feel as paranoid as the wizarding community in the face of the next Voldy War.
Hmmmm. Do you think that JKR wants us to be paranoid because we ought to be, or because she wants to lure us into error, only to then chastise us for it later?
It seems to me that GoF plays some very interesting games with the reader when it comes to suspicion. JKR has always enjoyed the red herring game, of course—she offers up Snape in the first volume, and Percy and Draco and Ginny and Hagrid in the second, and then Lupin and Crookshanks and the "Grim" in the third—but in GoF she really goes wild with the aspersion-casting, giving us a truly dizzying selection of suspicious people: Bagman and Crouch, and Karkaroff and Krum, and Moody and Snape (yet again!), and Fudge and...
Well. The list just goes on and on, doesn't it.
GoF is also, it seems to me, the first of the books which leaves the reader still feeling deeply uncertain about many of the characters' allegiances even after finishing the last page and closing the covers. It also gives us far more characters of complicated, divided, or otherwise indeterminate allegiance than we've seen in past volumes. Fudge, Karkaroff, Krum, Bagman, Percy, Crouch, Rita Skeeter...even Snape's allegiance is shown to be far more complicated than had been previously revealed.
The extent to which Things Are Not What They Seem, always an important element to the HB books, reaches an almost vertiginous level in GoF: even from the start, we are shown that Portkeys can look like an old boots, that Omniculars distract your attention from what's really happening in the game, that the beautiful Veela have the true faces of monsters, and that a cheerful QWC crowd can quickly become a racist mob. By the time we get to the end of the book, we've had elaborate Polyjuice masquerades, and yet more unregistered animagi, and half-giants passing as merely big-boned, and double-agent Potions Masters, and powerful Ministry officials transformed into bones, and dead characters who turn out to be alive after all...really, it's all a bit overwhelming.
Overall, the novel does seem designed to leave the reader with a sense of uneasiness, of foreboding, of indeterminacy. Things aren't nearly as neatly wrapped up as they have been in previous volumes. There are many loose ends, and many characters who seem to be headed straight for some very tough choices.
So yes. I do think that the text is encouraging us to feel uncertain and paranoid and suspicious. I also wonder, however, to what extent this might not be a kind of a trap. I find it interesting, for example, that the text seems to place a very strong emphasis on the perils of paranoia...while simultaneously encouraging us to view this paranoia as justified. There's a tension there, an uneasy ambivalence. It makes me wonder if we might not start seeing paranoia itself emerging in Book Five to take its place alongside prejudice and envy as one of the Big Spiritual Perils of the Potterverse.
Constant vigilance!
Oh, constant vigilance indeed! But let us not forget from whose mouth that sentiment was really coming all the way through GoF, shall we? ;->
Meglet wrote, regarding Dumbledore's statement to the tribunal that Snape is "now no more a Death Eater than I am":
I am sure that it is only my horribly twisted and suspicious mind that has occasionally wondered if that last sentence could possibly conceal an ironic double meaning. You know, the evil Dumbledore thing which I mostly resist believing in.
Eloise, I hereby nominate Meglet for membership in the Order of the Flying Hedgehog. She has not only confessed to secret thoughts of "Albus Dumbledore Is Ever So Evil;" she even found a nice bit of canon to back it up!
Give the lady a...er...well, what precisely does one get when one joins the ranks of the OFH, anyway? (Other than a nervous tic, that is.)
Meglet also said:
Don't panic. We are very definitely told that Snape was a DE.
Indeed he was. But then later on, you see, he re-Kanted.
—Elkins, exiting at a run, while ducking rotten cabbages
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