Dumbledore’s dead. It’s something I can’t pretend to have fully processed, even though I read the sixth Harry Potter book a number of years ago. Consider me mired somewhere in one of the stages of grief. Bargaining, maybe. Or Depressed.
Some people are stuck in the very first stage of grief: Denial. Hilariously, the internet is rife with web sites, forum discussions, and social media chatter postulating that Dumbledore’s death was (and is) an elaborate hoax by Joanne Rowling.
Rowling has since confirmed Dumbledore’s death, but only indirectly, and she seems to have remained coy on the subject, perhaps finding the question more valuable unanswered.
However, I’ll leave the dithering to conspiracy theorists and chat room groupies—I firmly and fully believe that Dumbledore was killed by Severus Snape at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in a stunning development that led to what is easily the most climactic literary experience of the new millennium (and perhaps the last century).
That her Harry Potter series is a remarkable work of literary fiction goes without saying in some circles. And though the literary elite invariably turn up their noses at anything that achieves popular success, in this case they’re wrong—Rowling is a master storyteller. Although her prose is remarkably clumsy (full of long, winding sentences, incoherent expository dialog, and adverb after painful adverb), her character development is fairly unparalleled in the world of modern fiction. Readers of all ages have no choice but to make deep emotional investments in many of the characters, to fully immerse in the 7-book-long narrative arc. It’s no secret that strong characters drive strong narratives, and an astonishing number of Harry Potter characters are deeply drawn and wonderfully complex (a feat admittedly made more manageable when you have the scope of 4000+ pages, 20+ hours on screen, and 15 years to leave your impression).
It’s easy to abandon the thought exercise, and dismiss this brilliance as genius—it almost seems futile, like pondering why Michael Jordan so dominated the basketball court in the 1980s, or Andy Warhol the pop art scene of the 1960s. Why even bother?
In my view, however, the more fascinating (yet mind-numbing) question is this: how could she kill Dumbledore? How could she do that to him? To us?
As a wannabe writer of fiction, I’m amazed by the audacity, the chutzpah, the cojones she demonstrated in taking him away from us—after making us love him, need him, rely on him for so many pages, over so many years. Fiction writers (good ones) will tell you that this is the wrong way to look at it—that she didn’t decide to kill Dumbledore. The story finally revealed itself to her, bit by bit, and she merely transcribed what she saw—she told us the truth.
I believe this. But still. How easy would it be to talk yourself out of committing this dreadful crime? How terrifying was it to contemplate alienating your loyal readers, who put bread on your table, and whose love for your work sent sales into record-breaking territory? The financial ramifications aside, how hard must it be to push your story blindly over the precipice, after putting your heart and soul into 3300 pages over the course of more than a decade? All we (her loyal readers) had to do was keep reading—Rowling had to keep on keeping on, had to keep toiling away, in spite of the grief, guilt, apprehension, and self-doubt that surely dogged her. And she had to do it with a smile—while a resentful and restive reader base stood waiting, alarmed, in a rebellious mood.
Years ago, we started reading the series aloud to my now-eleven-year-old son Riley. As we recently approached the end of Book Six (during which Rowling commits the crime), my apprehension mounting, I could sense the emotional connection he had made with Dumbledore’s character, and I wondered what effect his passing would have on Riley.
We carefully arranged to arrive at the dreadful tower scene at an opportune moment, with sufficient time to pause, ingest, and talk through our feelings. The tears I expected made a brief appearance, and I could see that Riley, at 11, was as devastated as I was at 30. Because Dumbledore is far more than a father figure—he’s a beacon of hope during dark times. He’s the adult in the room, the rest of us mere children, looking to him to tell us what to do while he’s busy slaying the beast that has darkened our doorstep.
Dumbledore’s death cut us off at the knees, left us all reeling. How could we possibly battle the Dark Lord without him?
How could she kill him?
It’s easier to know why she killed him (or at least to presume we can know), though not nearly as satisfying. Surely opinions and interpretations vary, but I think most readers would agree that Rowling knows, wisely, that death lurks patiently, constantly, unrelentingly among us—it’s perhaps the only constant in life as we know it (taxes aside). To paint a picture conspicuously absent of this reality would be dishonest—and honesty is, ironically, the fiction writer’s stock in trade.
Dumbledore was far from the only casualty in Harry’s world. We still all grieve for Sirius, Lupin, Tonks, and Fred Weasley (and, after some reflection, Severus Snape), not to mention several other minor characters. We even grieve for Harry’s parents, James and Lily, though we never knew them. The deaths of people all around Harry mark various stages of his burdensome journey to adulthood—a journey we agreed to take with him, and during which even the most cold-hearted of readers can’t help but shed a mental tear or two.
Good people die, sometimes at the hands of bad people. It’s easy to lose sight of this reality in the glossed-over, sugar-coated cocoons of modern comfort that we’ve built for ourselves here in the Western world.
The chronicling of good triumphing over evil is far more honest (and believable) when it doesn’t varnish away the costs borne along the way. For unflinchingly telling us the truth, we all owe JK Rowling a debt of gratitude.
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