Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

[sun-star]

Originally Posted by inked

Oh, really! Then you assume that the prophecy intends only Harry?

I do. At the very most it includes both Harry and Neville, but I'm certain it doesn't exclude Harry - or we'd be dealing with some extremely bathos and anticlimax when Harry finally gears himself up to battle and discovers it was all a mistake...

Plus, when does the prophecy become active in regard to the action? It is a miniature prequel if you will. It is primarily Delphic in construction, it has many potential interpretations - corpus throughout.

We don't know when the prophecy will become important - it certainly isn't at present. It has different interpretations now (though not many) because the series is not complete. When the series is finished, the meaning of the prophecy will not be open to interpretation.

I suspect that if you extracted the prophecy from the books and tried to read them without it, you would find the task most difficult and without a single binding thread of such importunance or importance.

Perhaps when we have more of it, the prophecy will give us what it fundamentally lacks - a reason. What it says at present is:

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... The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies...

What theme or 'single binding thread' does this illuminate? It's a vague nod to the 'chosen one' motif, but that's not a surprise in any novel with a single hero. It doesn't say why Harry is chosen, what the purpose of the battle is, why one of them must die... You could easily read the books without it as it now stands.

And I quite agree that there is no book to which critical deconstruction can not be applied, but would contend that it is valueless in most cases as the critics rarely accomplish much. (See THE PERSONAL HERESY by CS Lewis!)

Do you read much criticism yourself, apart from Lewis?