Harry Potter: with or without the epilogue?
- Thread starter Joe Washington
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I would have left it out, simply because I think the final moments of the preceding chapter would have made a superior closing. But the epilogue itself isn't bad or anything; I've never understood the amount of vitriol some people directed at it. It tells us nothing we couldn't have surmised, which is why it doesn't seem necessary to me, but by the same token absolutely every point about the characters' future should have been evident from the earlier resolution.
What I find with the epilogue is that, for me, it answers all the wrong questions.
By the end of DH, we've had a fairly harrowing look at the problems in wizarding society. It's riven with bigotry, inefficient public systems, and abuses of power. Harry's victory gets rid of the immediate threat of Voldemort, but does nothing to change the systems which created him and allowed his rise to power (twice).
Skip ahead nineteen years, and what do we learn? That Harry and friends are living the happy middle-England heterosexual dream. Anyone who doesn't fit that just isn't mentioned. They're back in Harry's mental waiting room - King's Cross Station. There's no politics here, and no sense of the wider world. (And no progression, because the kids are all really just reincarnations of the same old circles.)
So I think there's something bitterly ironic about that final line. "The scar hand not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well". All is well for a very narrow definition of 'all'.
Then again, it's not the first book to have a very ambivalent "happy ending" - one doesn't necessarily hold it against Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, or Sense & Sensibility, for instance.
By the end of DH, we've had a fairly harrowing look at the problems in wizarding society. It's riven with bigotry, inefficient public systems, and abuses of power. Harry's victory gets rid of the immediate threat of Voldemort, but does nothing to change the systems which created him and allowed his rise to power (twice).
Skip ahead nineteen years, and what do we learn? That Harry and friends are living the happy middle-England heterosexual dream. Anyone who doesn't fit that just isn't mentioned. They're back in Harry's mental waiting room - King's Cross Station. There's no politics here, and no sense of the wider world. (And no progression, because the kids are all really just reincarnations of the same old circles.)
So I think there's something bitterly ironic about that final line. "The scar hand not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well". All is well for a very narrow definition of 'all'.
Then again, it's not the first book to have a very ambivalent "happy ending" - one doesn't necessarily hold it against Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, or Sense & Sensibility, for instance.
It's been a couple of years since I read DH, but remember being entirely underwhelmed by the Epilogue. I can't remember the specifics of my distaste for the epilogue, but I remember feeling as though Rowling either said too much or not enough. In other words, the idea of an epilogue is perfectly fine ... but the manner with which Rowling wrote it left a lot to be desired.
As for including it in the film ... well, they *are* trying to fill two movies. I guess if they have room to include it, they might as well. Perhaps they can find a way to improve upon what Rowling did?
I seem to recall reading that Rowling had actually written a much longer epilogue but cut it for pacing. I enjoyed it, and my only complaint was that it was too short. I'd definitely love to see her additional writings, and if they can film it for DH that would be even better.
That was my problem with it, too. After all that has happened, skip 19 years on a couple of pages. And the kids names?! That was just too much and IMO not suitable end to such a great book.
Dude.. it's a friggin' modern fairy tale!
It's not a socio-political commentary about the state of affairs of a fictional wizard society and was never intended to be. It's a tale about good vs. evil and the good side won. The End.
^ Not too many fairy tales have the main characters meet heads of state on multiple occasions, face trials, have best friends who attempt to start political awareness campaigns, worry about media bias or become depressed by reading possibly sensationalistic biographies of their mentors. Sorry, but Hansel or Jack of the Beanstalk Harry ain't; he isn't even as much a fairy-tale figure as OT (non-EU) Luke Skywalker. Rowling shouldn't get to dabble in the (presumed) sophistication of political subplots and deliberate real-world parallels on the one hand but be shielded from subtext-related criticism with the torpid and foppish "it's only a fairy tale" protest on the other.
Now, The Prydain Chronicles, those are fairy-tale books with recognizably liberal/humanist undertones and none of the trappings of modernity, and they end with a bittersweet, decidedly not-pat ending that leaves much to the imagination. Rowling would have been well-advised to take inspiration from them.
Now, The Prydain Chronicles, those are fairy-tale books with recognizably liberal/humanist undertones and none of the trappings of modernity, and they end with a bittersweet, decidedly not-pat ending that leaves much to the imagination. Rowling would have been well-advised to take inspiration from them.
^ Even more simplistically, the Epilogue ends with the same "rivalries" (e.g. suspicions and prejudices) of Hogwarts houses. One would have thought that there'd be some sort of reconciliation, or at least reduction in petty rivalry, as a result of the events in the Potter books -- particularly if a Slytherin named Snape is revered enough to provide the name for one of Harry's children.
The final battle constitutes a big "unity" moment, with the centaurs helping (though they're just a separate society, and there's no real reason day-to-day they shouldn't stay that way), various people like the Malfoys basically throwing in the towel on their ideology, etc. And there's a better Minister appointed at to do the job at least temporarily. Symbolically, breaking Voldemort's alliance is like the defeat of fascism in terms of discrediting it, I think we're meant to take it.
The epilogue is a character piece, mainly; Harry gets the family he was always looking for throughout the series.
It didn't have to be some deep epilogue about the state of the world, but something that didn't come across as if it was written by a teenage girl obsessed with shipping would have been nice. Less shipping and more substance.
Yeah I saw the epilogue exactly as how Captain Canada states...a character piece. We get to see a happy ending for Harry as he has finally what he's always wanted, a family and people who love and care about him. I didn't see it as a shipper piece at all...but maybe that's just me, I must be missing something here.
Admiral_Young is the only person professing not to understand the other side's views here. We who oppose the epilogue understand that it's a character piece, and we still dislike it.
Sigh. I stated in my original post in this thread that I thought it was unnecessary to have included in the book but enjoyed it, and I do understand why you don't like it. I also agree that it could have been included as encyclopedic entries in Rawlings encyclopedia whenever she decides to write it.
Why don't you just pretend that that's what she did?
I'm guessing you didn't go to a school with houses, so I'll say this: the rivalry in the epilogue is nothing.
Having said that, Slytherin=evil (not the prejudice, the fact that it's true) is my least favourite thing about the books, probably. It's childish and obvious. A relic of the more childish book 1. I would have preferred a more obvious cohort of Sytherins who weren't jerks, and a more obvious example of people from the other houses being dark-side inclined.
I've taught in schools with houses. A friendly rivalry is perfectly fine -- heck, it can even be a positive thing. But at least in the schools I've been in, at the end of the day, everyone still belongs to the same school. You can identify with a house, but there's still an overall school spirit. That's healthy. But that's not what we see in the epilogue. We're back to the same petty prejudices that existed in, as you put it, "the more childish book 1." This demonstrates that, somehow, these characters are *still* holding grudges, nineteen years after the fact -- nineteen years after they've supposedly gotten over the petty differences that led to conflict to begin with.
Hey, maybe that's exactly what Rowling wanted to depict. Still doesn't make it a good idea, though.
Hey, maybe that's exactly what Rowling wanted to depict. Still doesn't make it a good idea, though.
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