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Derannimer wrote:
By the way, in a rather serious footnote: Elkins, do you think that Mr. Crouch's inability to recognize other people's identities has anything to do with his cronic inability to remember his assistant's name?)
Heh. I have no idea if "cronic" was intended as a pun or was just a typo, but it amused me no end to read it as the former, given my reading of Crouch-as-Saturn.
Yeah, thematically, I do view Crouch's inability to remember Percy's name in just that light. I also think that it serves to emphasize that whole "misplaced loyalty" motif for Percy, whom I see as being a bit of a double to Crouch Jr. in this story. Poor Percy just idolizes this man, and he seems to be rapidly transferring his filial devotion onto him, and yet Crouch can't even be bothered to get his name right. Just like Voldemort never came to save Barty Jr. from the dementor. ;-)
I also think that the whole "Weatherby" schtick, while it obviously serves mainly as a comedy routine, also may help to facilitate the Whodunnit aspect of the story. In and of itself, it's just humorous, a joke on Percy. But combined with all of the other strange or dodgy things that the author keeps handed us about Crouch, I wonder if it might not also take on faintly sinister connotations, thus serving to subtly reinforce Crouch's role as red herring.
Certainly, something about that stand-alone sentence about Crouch leaving the tea undrunk has always read to me like a deliberate authorial attempt at misdirection. I think that it does come across as a "clue," although in the end, it's nothing but a false lead.
On the more mundane plot level, though -- in terms of Crouch's character as a person? Hmmm. Well, I'd certainly say that it speaks to a certain tellingly high level of self-absorption, much as does his refusal to take so much of a sip of the tea that Percy so eagerly offers him at the QWC (honestly, now! Would it have killed the man to have taken just one polite sip?).
Of course, Crouch would have been unusually stressed and distracted at the time that Percy started working for him. Percy would have started working for him at just about the same time that he would have started fretting about Bertha Jorkins' disappearance. I'm sure that he was also feeling stressed about his plan to take his son to the upcoming QWC. And of course, he would have been very busy plannning the Tournament, as well. Given all of that, I guess that maybe it's a little bit less surprising that his new employee's name somehow never properly registered with him, although it still does snap my suspenders of disbelief just a tiny bit.
It snaps my suspenders mainly, I think, because I just find it so hard to believe that even under somewhat adverse circumstances, Crouch wouldn't have been able to muster better interpersonal skills than those we see him display in canon. He was a successful politician, after all, and while I myself share Meira's difficulty with remembering people's names, successful politicians don't. Successful politicians learn the trick of getting people's names right -- and then of remembering them. They also know that they're supposed to sip the tea. ;-)
Also, I really do find it hard to imagine how even an unusually stressed and distracted Crouch could have failed to know Percy's name, given that (a) he did know Arthur, and (b) everyone else in the wizarding world seems to be able to spot a Weasley a mile off. Even the eleven-year-old Draco knows a Weasley when he sees one. So it does seem strange to me that it wouldn't have occurred to Crouch that his new red-haired-worker-who-has-some-name-beginning-with-a-W really must have been a Weasley.
One possibility that has occurred to me is that Crouch's powers of focus and attention might have been getting subtly sapped by his son's growing Imperius resistance. Where's the cause and where the effect here? Was Barty Jr. finding it easier to resist because his father was going into a mental decline? Or was it because Voldemort's return to corporeal Ugly!Baby form was strengthening young Crouch's will, which in turn then had an insidious yet negative effect on his father's powers of memory and concentration?
I'm partial to the latter theory, myself.
—Elkins (glad that Derannimer liked the Crouch posts so much and currently trying to respond to Eileen's responses without getting into the hundreds-of-pages-long problem.)
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on January 29, 2003 3:47 PM
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