Harry Potter: A Wealth of Comparisons

            Spoiler Alert! If you are not a devoted fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and haven’t read the end of The Deathly Hallows, this blog contains significant information about the conclusion of the series. Seriously, don’t read this if you haven’t read the entirety of the seventh book, I don’t want to be that person that told everyone the end.

A few blog posts ago, I paralleled The Namesake with the Harry Potter series and I blamed my fanatical rant on the fact that the newest movie of the books had just come out.  Now however, I must let my true colors show as an obsessed Harry Potter follower because I have done it again, without an upcoming release to act as my scapegoat. I found a beautiful comparison in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  At one point, the narrator, “Broom” Bromden, a man in a mental hospital masquerading as a deaf mute but instead making keen observations on the happenings of the institution, apostrophizes to the audience, begging to take his mentally unstable views seriously.  He asserts: “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen” (8).  When I read this, I thought immediately of the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when Harry has an out-of-body experience after walking to his death. He finds himself in a misty King’s Crossing talking to the ghost of Dumbledore.  At the end of their profound conversation, Harry asks Dumbledore if this strange experience only happened in his head, or if it was real.  The always insightful Albus Dumbledore responds, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?” To compare, Bromden’s world as a mental patient, could very well exist solely “inside [his] head,” but still remains noteworthy enough to get published as a novel.  Although the line from Kesey’s book serves to make the audience question his ethos because it “didn’t happen,” this fact remains inconsequential because even as someone mentally unsound, Bromden still presents poignant information worth taking into account.  Dumbledore’s rhetorical question parallels Bromden’s assertion that both reality and fantasy have something to offer, so it does not matter exactly which group something fits in, but rather what the audience takes from it.  In Harry’s case, he took the information from his mentor and went on with hopes to defeat Voldemort once and for all.  In Bromden’s case, or instead, our case as the audience of Kesey’s novel, we will read on with an open mind, willing to learn from Bromden’s plight and apply it to our own lives.  I suppose this pertains to all of AP English 12, because we read fiction novels, those based in illusion instead of fact as non-fiction novels are, and still pull audiences and purposes and grow and change from them.