The Reality of Fantasy: The Truth Behind Harry Potter

Spoiler alert: If you’re a Potter fan, do not read this article until you have finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Rudyard Kipling said: “Fiction is Truth’s elder sister…. No one in the world knew what truth was until someone had told a story.” Kipling was not talking about factual truth, for fiction is not about facts; it’s about feelings, about those wonderful abstracts that define our lives: love, freedom, justice, courage. For the past decade, no books have inspired as much feeling among children and critics alike as those penned by J.K. Rowling.

Some take issue with adults who read children’s literature, as if art meant for children has less value than that created for adults. We seem to forget that children have their own kind of intelligence, far more flexible and open-ended than ours. They are largely unfettered by the constraints that keep most of us from stopping to gaze in wonder at a butterfly on the windowsill. The best children’s writers tap into these budding minds, and children’s literature can remind adults to appreciate aspects of the world we had long ago forgotten or written off as worthless.

As if cleverly responding to her critics, Rowling makes a children’s fairy tale essential to the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment of the series. Dumbledore, the deceased headmaster of Hogwarts, explains why Voldemort, the vicious antagonist, will fail: “Of…children’s tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing … That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.”

Fantasy often gets a bad rap as well, but some forget that such elements played a crucial role in the writing of Shakespeare, Homer and other authors of classic Western literature. Moreover, J.R.R. Tolkien was an Oxford professor who created his own language, and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer inspired some academics to develop a new discipline: Buffy Studies. If flexing your imagination is a necessary part of everyday life, the allure of Harry Potter’s magical world is hard to resist. I wish it were real, the good and the bad, for the good makes me giddy with delight, and the bad is no worse than all the war and bigotry that already exists in the real world. But as much as I would love to be a student at Hogwarts, the fantasy world Rowling has created is just one aspect of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Like the above-mentioned writers, Rowling uses fantasy to examine reality.

Like most great bildungsromans, the Harry Potter series should be praised for its honesty. Rowling does not use smoke and mirrors to protect her characters from the dark side of life: jealousy, betrayal, fury, despair and death. She allows her characters to fear death, wonder how it feels, discuss what happens afterward and, ultimately, find a way to accept it. In The Deathly Hallows, Rowling dedicates an entire chapter to Harry’s thoughts as he walks to his death knowing that it must happen. He is terrified, his wand hand shaking, and Rowling’s tone and language are so realistic that we, as readers, feel what Harry feels as he recalls the best times of his life with Ron and Hermione, realizing that he will never again have those moments. And this is the ultimate sadness — not that Harry will die, but that nothing will ever be the same for any character.

Unlike most children’s literature (and contemporary American politics), the Harry Potter books emphasize that everything is not black and white. Rather, there is an ambiguous line between good and evil. Dumbledore, we come to find out, is not wholly good but has his own faults, and Voldemort’s sociopathic personality can be traced back to inbreeding (the result of a pureblood lineage) and abandonment. No one ever loved him, and with no knowledge of love, how could he be anything but a monster?

Rowling also encourages questioning authority, as Harry does time and time again. Book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, on which the most recent film was based, clearly centers around McCarthyism, and the final two books reveal that the wizard world is not immune to fascism. Only pureblood wizards who remain true to their race are safe. Muggle-borns, those whose parents are not wizards, and so-called blood traitors face restrictions much like Jews under the Nazis. The books are staunchly anti-racist and pro-active. Harry’s status as “The Boy Who Lived” (after surviving Voldemort’s first attempt on his life) and his much deeper connection with Voldemort, which we discover in the final book, mean he has little choice but to fight. His friends, however, voluntarily risk their lives to put an end to hate, a powerful lesson to combat the apathy of today’s youngest generations.

Rowling’s writing style has been much maligned, but her intricate plots are divine. In The Deathly Hollows, she ties up loose ends with finesse, revealing how even the smallest details in the first book led to the conclusion. Rowling may not excel at poetic prose, but she does not need to. It’s her ability to tell a story, to hone a masterful narrative and create sympathetic character that thrills us to our toes. I have never shed more than a few secret tears over a book, but I am not ashamed to say that I sobbed while reading this one. Harry is a hero, yes, but his heroism has never been easy. He has been impulsive, angry, frustrated, scared and quick to judge. He is a teenager, after all, and his great battles are symbolic of the struggles each of us must endure in trying to figure out who we are.

Young people the world over identify with these stories. A boy in Brazil taught himself to read English because he could not wait for one of the books to come out in Portuguese. Rowling’s writing speaks to these kids. And it speaks to adults, too, even those of us who swear by noted stylists. Ultimately, we crave a good story. We nurture our imaginations because imagination is what allows democracy to thrive. It’s what our lives depend on, and yet, as a society, we are letting it atrophy by not encouraging the reading of fiction. Thank goodness for J.K. Rowling, who understands that we must equip our children with the tools to change the world, for when we interpret literature we are truly interpreting life.