Quote from Naaga on April 14, 2023, 12:50 am

Source: Analysis: Harry, Prongs, and the Prince - Harry's Inner Struggles in Forging An Identity by metametatron4

Analysis: Harry, Prongs, and the Prince - Harry's Inner Struggles in Forging An Identity

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This post analyzes the inner struggles Harry experiences in rooting his identity in his father and identifying with the Half-Blood Prince, focusing on books 5-7. Harry's idolization and disillusionment of Prongs parallels his idolization and disillusionment of the Prince a year later.

​For "nearly five years," Harry idolizes his father and enjoys being compared with him. Harry witnessing SWM is a major upheaval for him in what he believes about James and, therefore, what he believes about himself through his own identification with James:

"Harry’s mood suddenly lifted. His father had not been a prefect either. All at once the party seemed much more enjoyable; he loaded up his plate, feeling unusually fond of everyone in the room."

“Of course I do!” said Sirius. “D’you think your father and I would’ve lain down and taken orders from an old hag like Umbridge?”

"Harry stopped in front of the desk and gazed down at his fifteen-year- old father...Excitement exploded in the pit of his stomach: It was as though he was looking at himself..."

"For nearly five years the thought of his father had been a source of comfort, of inspiration. Whenever someone had told him he was like James he had glowed with pride inside. And now ... now he felt cold and miserable at the thought of him."

​

Harry's first reaction to this great personal conflict is to reject it:

He was not sure what Sirius could possibly say to him that would make up for what he had seen in the Pensieve, but he was desperate to hear Sirius’s own account of what had happened, to know of any mitigating factors there might have been, any excuse at all for his father’s behavior. . .

Harry is willing to confront the conflict by investigating, but he's desperately hoping to find evidence that supports his original, positive views of James. We see his attitude change before he actually gets to contact Sirius:

"He could abandon the plan and simply learn to live with the memory of what his father had done on a summer’s day more than twenty years ago...

And then he remembered Sirius in the fire upstairs in the Gryffindor common room... ’’You ’re less like your father than I thought... The risk would’ve been what made it fun for James...”

But did he want to be like his father anymore? “Harry, don’t do it, please don’t do it!” Hermione said in anguished tones as the bell rang at the end of the class.

Harry now confronts 2 separate personal conflicts: was his dad a good person and does Harry want to be like him anymore. He takes great efforts in order to communicate with Sirius over this; when he doesn't receive the sort of counter-evidence he originally hoped for, he's willing to champion the moral view by rejecting Sirius and Lupin's excuses for James, thereby condemning his father's actions as wrong.

​

Despite condemning his father's actions, Harry isn't ready to reject James. Harry reacts fondly when Ron "sweeping his hair" while recounting a Quidditch match reminds him of his dad's efforts to look cool. Then in HBP, Harry is thrilled by the possibility that his Potions book annotations might be authored by his dad:

“My dad used this spell,” said Harry. “I — Lupin told me.” This last part was not true; in fact, Harry had seen his father use the spell on Snape, but he had never told Ron and Hermione about that particular excursion into the Pensieve. Now, however, a wonderful possibility occurred to him. Could the Half-Blood Prince possibly be —?

Although several months prior, James' use of Levicorpus on Snape disgusted Harry (who identified with Snape in that moment: "he knew how it felt to be humiliated in the middle of a circle of onlookers, knew exactly how Snape had felt"), Harry is willing to overlook his previous objections and repulsion in the face of new evidence of his dad being cool in the mysterious character of "the Half-Blood Prince." It is a testament to how deeply Harry connects with "the Prince" that Harry is willing to put James back up on a pedestal should James and the Prince prove to be one and the same. Through the textbook, Harry is able to see how Levicorpus can be a funny spell when used between friends when he accidentally casts it on Ron. (It's also his first use of nonverbal magic, a skill which he had struggled with earlier in his 6th year lessons.) He and Ron defend the Prince from Hermione's reproach when she compares Levicorpus to the similar spell used to torment the Muggle family at the World Cup campgrounds in GoF.

Harry determines to ask Lupin about the Half-Blood Prince (believing him to be his dad) in a way the echoes Harry contacting Sirius to discover more about what sort of person his dad was. However, this time, Harry feels "excitement" akin to what he felt at the start of SWM when first seeing his dad, before his idealized perception of his dad was broken:

Harry, meanwhile, felt a rush of excitement: This last mention of his father had reminded him that there was something he had been looking forward to asking Lupin.

“Have you ever heard of someone called the Half- Blood Prince?”

Lupin connects "the prince" to Harry, believing it to be a title Harry is considering for himself:

“There are no Wizarding princes,” said Lupin, now smiling. “Is this a title you’re thinking of adopting? I should have thought being ‘the Chosen One’ would be enough.”

“It’s nothing to do with me!” said Harry indignantly.

Although Harry protests that the HBP has nothing to do with him, he obviously wants the title to have something to do with him because he hopes it belongs to his dad. This desired connection is understandable considering Harry saw the Prince as a "guide and friend." In the character of the Prince, Harry can idealize his father again. We see how much the connection matters to him:

He tried to sound casual, as though this was a throwaway comment of no real importance, but he was not sure he had achieved the right effect; Lupin’s smile was a little too understanding.

When Lupin convinces Harry that James was not the Prince, Harry defaults to his next best options, trying to graft his strong connection to the Prince onto Sirius or Lupin:

Abandoning pretense, Harry said, “And it wasn’t Sirius? Or you?”

“Definitely not.”

“Oh.” Harry stared into the fire. “I just thought — well, he’s helped me out a lot in Potions classes, the Prince has.”

Harry doesn't elaborate what he "just thought," but we can assume Harry holds the Prince in great esteem since he hoped the Prince would turn out to be one of the 3 people he expressed admiration for in the past. We can imagine that the Prince's help was something Harry greatly valued since Harry stubbornly persists in this imagined connection, defending the Prince multiple times, even after almost killing Draco with Sectumsempra:

you can’t blame the Prince, he hadn’t written ‘try this out, it’s really good’ — he was just making notes for himself, wasn’t he, not for anyone else…”

Sectumsempra itself wasn't a dealbreaker for Harry. Only the fear of getting caught out by Snape persuades him to get rid of the textbook temporarily. Harry had intended to retrieve it from its hiding place. He is desperate to keep this connection with the Prince and to preserve an untarnished view of him.

​

In identifying with the Prince and defending him, Harry explores ideas about himself:

“I don’t believe this,” said Hermione. “You’re actually defending — ”

“I’m not defending what I did!” said Harry quickly. “I wish I hadn’t done it, and not just because I’ve got about a dozen detentions. You know I wouldn’t’ve used a spell like that, not even on Malfoy, but you can’t blame the Prince..."

In the same breath, Harry states he isn't defending his own actions against Draco, but he defends the Prince for supplying the spell. It's practically a defense of his own actions by proxy.

Harry claims he "wouldn't've used a spell like that" when he absolutely did use a spell "like that" (meaning thoughtlessly). Harry most likely meant he wouldn't have used Sectumsempra in particular if he knew what its effects were, but Harry has spent months testing the Prince's spells on other people without proof that he knew their effects beforehand:

"Harry had already attempted a few of the Prince’s self- invented spells. There had been a hex that caused toenails to grow alarmingly fast (he had tried this on Crabbe in the corridor, with very entertaining results); a jinx that glued the tongue to the roof of the mouth (which he had twice used, to general applause, on an unsuspecting Argus Filch); and, perhaps most useful of all, Muffliato, a spell that filled the ears of anyone nearby with an unidentifiable buzzing,"

Although Harry wishes he "hadn't done it" not "just because" of his detentions, he is generally cavalier about almost murdering Draco. He doesn't disagree with Ginny when she characterizes Sectumsempra as "something good up his sleeve!” It is not until Snape reveals himself as the Half-Blood Prince, after doing the unthinkable--murdering Dumbledore--that Harry has a change of heart regarding the book and its author. (Just like Harry didn't reject James completely after SWM, Harry doesn't reject the Prince completely after this betrayal: while Harry believes Snape to be a true DE, he still makes use of the spells he learned from the textbook, although not Sectumsempra.)

​

The Prince offers a hero's aid to Harry, who credits him for feats of heroism (saving Ron's life) and great skill (winning Felix):

"without the Prince I’d never have won the Felix Felicis. I’d never have known how to save Ron from poisoning, I’d never have — ”

“ — got a reputation for Potions brilliance you don’t deserve,” said Hermione nastily

By pointing out that Harry earned his Potions reputation undeservedly through the Prince, who was the true brilliant Potioneer, Hermione points out that Harry and the Prince are one and the same--at least as far as Slughorn is concerned. Harry echoes this close relationship by attributing his recent accomplishments to the Prince. He is able to put the Prince's directions into action (in a sense, embodying the Prince).

Seeing the Prince as a person who helps him accomplish amazing things is not unlike the way Harry viewed his own father in PoA when Harry casts his Patronus to save Sirius from dementors.

“Come on!” he muttered, staring about. “Where are you? Dad, come on — ”

But no one came. Harry raised his head to look at the circle of dementors across the lake. One of them was lowering its hood. It was time for the rescuer to appear — but no one was coming to help this time — And then it hit him — he understood. He hadn’t seen his father — he had seen himself — Harry flung himself out from behind the bush and pulled out his wand.

Harry's deep betrayal by the Prince (which occurs when Harry connects the Prince with Dumbledore's killer) is similar to his reaction to seeing his father's ugly and dark side:

He could not stop himself dwelling upon Dumbledore’s inexcusable trust in Snape…but as Hermione had just inadvertently reminded him, he, Harry, had been taken in just the same…in spite of the increasing nastiness of those scribbled spells, he had refused to believe ill of the boy who had been so clever, who had helped him so much...

Helped him ... it was an almost unendurable thought now

Harry feels "cold and miserable at the thought of [his father]" after witnessing his behavior in SWM and he finds thoughts of Prince's previous help "unendurable" to bear after witnessing Snape murder Dumbledore.

Harry undergoes the same pattern of idolization and disillusionment with both characters. JKR made this parallel explicit by having Harry mistake "the Prince" for his dad: who on earth would mix up James Potter and Severus Snape? Yet that is exactly what Harry had done for months.

​In DH, Harry is able to truly find himself in both men. Harry admonishes Lupin for leaving his family by wielding James' memory against him, saying, "I’m pretty sure my father would have wanted to know why you aren’t sticking with your own kid, actually." Harry claims James would want to know why Lupin has left Teddy, but it is Harry himself who demands this explanation from Lupin and counters Lupin's logic that Teddy is safer with him gone. When Harry battles Voldemort, he taunts him with Snape's true allegiance, announcing "Snape was Dumbledore’s," once again feeling confident to speak for a dead man. Harry effectively gives Snape the title he himself was proudest to bear:

“Dumbledore’s man through and through, aren’t you, Potter?”

“Yeah, I am,” said Harry. “Glad we straightened that out.”

It is not so surprising that Harry names his sons James Sirius and Albus Severus, or that he is able to forgive both men for their failings considering that viewing Snape's memories is what sets Harry off on the journey to his own death and Harry summons James (and Lily, Lupin, and Sirius) to help him complete that journey. It makes sense then, that when Harry does manage to escape death, he memorializes them in his future and his legacy by passing their names to his children.