OVERANALYZING THE TEXT

Leon wrote:

My question though, is why Moody worked with Harry so many times on the curses, why he worked with Harry until it was nearly guarenteed that he'd be able to resist Voldemort?

Well. For one thing, why on earth would Crouch think that Harry's resistance to the Imperius Curse would help him against Voldemort? Voldemort planned to kill Harry, not to use him as his Imperio'd tool. Crouch makes it perfectly clear that he knew this in his final encounter with Harry, when he talks about how much Voldemort had been looking forward to killing him. It likely didn't even occur to Crouch that Voldemort might decide to entertain himself by trying to use the Imperius Curse on Harry first.

It's also quite possible that Crouch didn't really believe that Harry, as preternaturally gifted with resistance as he might be, could possibly succeed in resisting Lord Voldemort's Imperius Curse. Canon seems to imply that the power of such curses depends in part on the power of the caster: in his role as Moody, Crouch tells his DADA class that even if they tried in concert to AK him, he would likely not get so much as a "nosebleed;" and judging from its effects on Cedric Diggory, Victor Krum's Cruciatus Curse, while undoubtedly an exceptionally unpleasant experience, nonetheless really didn't seem to be nearly as agonizing an ordeal as Harry, Avery, and Wormtail all found Voldemort's Cruciatus to be. To a fanatically devoted follower like Crouch, it probably seemed inconceivable that Harry's resistance would have stood up for a second against the magical might of the Dark Lord Himself.

The last time this subject came up, I offered the following list of possible explanations for Crouch's enthusiasm for teaching resistance against Imperius (section below reprinted from message #34133):

Possible Explanations:

(a) Crouch is deeply immersed in his role. The real Alastor Moody would have been pleased by Harry's talent and would have gone out of his way to encourage him to develop this skill. Crouch therefore does the same.

(b) Little Barty Crouch, the Boo Radley of the wizarding world, hates Imperius, having been himself enslaved by it for over a decade. He is thrilled to see anyone succeed in fighting it off and takes a grim satisfaction in teaching students to resist it.

(c) Crouch doesn't believe for a moment that Harry's talent at resisting the Imperius Curse will do squat for him in the long run. Voldemort plans on killing Harry, not controlling him. And even if he does decide to play with the boy for a little while first, it will not matter: Harry's resistance to Imperius will not save him, and may even bring greater glory to the Dark Lord's inevitable victory. So why on earth not teach him? And why bother to inform Voldemort of his talent in this arena?

(d) Crouch would have been an excellent teacher himself, if only his life had turned out differently; like all good teachers, he takes a genuine and instinctive pleasure in helping students to succeed at difficult tasks.

Of these, I prefer (e), all of the above.

These days, I still prefer (e), all of the above.

And why did he give Neville those books, inspiring the kid to work harder to excel.

Well, what Crouch tells Harry is that he gave Neville the Water Plants of the Meditteranean book because it included a description of the magical properties of gillyweed. He had assumed that Harry would solicit advice from his friends about how to approach the Second Task, and that Neville would then volunteer that information, enabling Harry to succeed.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's always seemed rather far-fetched to me, too, but that's what Crouch says.

Personally, though, I've got a sneaking suspicion that while Crouch did indeed give Neville that particular book as a part of his Cunning Plan, he also enjoyed encouraging Neville for many of the same reasons that he enjoyed teaching Harry how to resist the Imperius Curse. He thought that it was what the real Moody would have done. It appealed to his sense of irony. And he just plain liked teaching.

If we assume that Crouch Sr.'s ravings in Chapter Twenty-Eight of GoF ("Yes, my son has recently gained twelve O.W.L.s, most satisfactory, yes, thank you, yes, very proud indeed...") are in fact based in past reality—and I think that this is certainly what the text implies—then Crouch Jr. would seem to have been himself an exceptional student. He also displays throughout the book a strong degree of sensitivity to other people—how they think, where their weaknesses lie, where they are strong, where they are vulnerable—although he uses this talent almost wholly for sadistic and manipulative ends.

Really, he's a bit like Lupin, isn't he? Like Lupin gone horribly horribly bad.

My feeling about Crouch is that he was born to teach. It's a terrible pity, really.

Why not laugh at the feeble spawn of the parents he had killed, and leave Neville to wallow another year? . . . . It seems totally out of character for Crouch, even mascarading as Moody.

Well, it's really hard to say what might or might not have been in character for Crouch, isn't it? We can't even say for sure how much of his behavior in GoF is really him, and how much is just his Moody impersonation. Even at the very end, when he gets an entire chapter-long confession monologue, everything he says is filtered through the coercive and affect-deadening effects of the veritaserum.

We can't even say for sure, for example, that Crouch bore any particular animosity against Neville. His treatment of Draco Malfoy certainly implies that he had no difficulties with the notion of punishing children for their parents' sins, but then, from his point of view, Lucius Malfoy had gone unpunished. Perhaps he felt no similar rancour against the offspring of the Longbottoms because in his mind, Neville's parents (who aren't dead, by the way — just mad) already had "paid" for their transgressions.

Alternatively, he might have taken a genuine interest in Neville because of the role he played in the Longbottoms' fate. He's clearly curious about Neville from the very start, and while he is certainly proud of the fact that, unlike the rest of the Death Eaters, he tried to seek Voldemort after his fall, we are given no hint as to what his feelings on the Longbottom Incident itself might be. It's possible that he actually felt remorse. Certainly, there's some evidence to suggest that as a much younger (and not nearly so insane) man, he did. In his appearance in the Pensieve, the dementors seem to be affecting him much more strongly than they are his three co-defendents, and it only took a year of Azkaban to ship him straight to his death-bed. There are a number of reasons that this might have been the case. Remorse is one of the more compelling ones, IMO.

All Crouch needed was to be mediocre - teach the course book, don't cover extras, keep a low profile. Befriend Harry along the way only as much as it would help keep him in the game.

Yes, but Crouch was just a Great Big Show-off, wasn't he.

That is one thing that I think we can deduce about his real personality in GoF: that he just loved to show off. In Chapter 17, right after Harry's name comes out of the Goblet of Fire, he pushes his way into that little room off the Great Hall and then proceeds to announce his entire plan to everyone present — just 'cause he can! He never misses an opportunity to use a double-edged phrasing that, if only parsed the proper way, would give away his game. He never misses the opportunity to create a theatrical effect (much of that must be Moody, of course, or else Dumbledore would have suspected him much earlier, but I think that all that theatricality suited the real Crouch as well). And in the endgame, he just can't resist falling into that Classic Villain Error of explaining to Harry all about how terribly cunning he has been. Crouch is a show-off.

And also, can you imagine how utterly boring it must have been for him, all those years? He'd been incarcerated, one way or another, ever since the age of nineteen! And for at least a decade of that, he was not only under mental control, but also indoors and invisible and assumed dead and allowed to talk to no one but...Winky. In short, he'd been living as an Unperson, a person almost utterly without identity.

Finally freed from all that, I can't imagine that he could have borne to be "mediocre," or to have kept a low profile. I tend to see a lot of Crouch's behavior in GoF as that of a seriously deranged arrested adolescent, Cutting Loose in a big big way.

—Elkins, always happy to talk about Crouch Jr., whom she finds utterly intriguing