5 The theme of Choice and Chance Harry Potter

5 The theme of Choice and Chance Harry Potter.

The Harry Potter series is esteemed and loved for many reasons: the rich fantasy world, the beloved characters, the humor, the suspense-driven plots, the meaningful choices... and the way the plot fits together like a tightly constructed jigsaw puzzle. The endings of the Harry Potter novels are filled with "oh, yeah!" moments in which everything suddenly fits together in new and unexpected ways: the revelation of Tom Riddle as Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the unmasking of Peter Pettigrew in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,and the true identity of the Prince in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. At the end of each Potter novel a final resolution is reached and the loose ends are neatly tied up.

Except in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Deathly Hallows includes a full resolution for many issues, and Rowling's post-publication interviews provided closure for more details, for example with the very welcome (to me) news that Dolores Umbridge was finally made to pay for her crimes.However, the climax of the Deathly Hallows ’ the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort ’ seems to leave several loose ends and ambiguities.

The climax of Deathly Hallows occurs when Harry sets off to sacrifice himself and allows Voldemort to hit him with the Killing Curse. The Horcrux within Harry is destroyed, Harry survives through his blood connection with Voldemort, and Voldemort's power is broken as a result.

This is the way I read it, but it leaves many unanswered questions. What exactly is the role of Harry's final sacrifice, and how did it defeat Voldemort in the end? Is the outcome the result of Harry's choice, or is it due to the chance acquisition of the Elder Wand? Harry's self-sacrifice seems to be the critical point at which Voldemort's power is broken, but the story of the Elder Wand points towards a resolution in which the outcome is determined mainly by chance. The following is an attempt to identify the loose ends in this, the most important final piece of the Harry Potter puzzle, and give my view that choice, not chance determines the outcome. Perhaps Rowling will provide help at some future date!

The question of choice versus chance runs throughout the Harry Potter series. The question appears first at the end of Chamber of Secrets, when Riddle/Voldemort tells Harry that "it was merely a lucky chance that saved you" after he is told that Lily's sacrifice was the reason he had not been able to kill baby Harry. Dumbledore subsequently tells Harry that "it is our choices [¦] that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."  Throughout the series, Voldemort continues to insist on chance as the cause of his downfall, right up to the bitter end. Dumbledore, by contrast, insists on the importance of personal choice in determining outcomes, rather than either chance or fate. Rowling has said that Dumbledore often speaks for her (and Voldemort certainly does not), so it seems that she would also believe in choice rather than chance. Although Harry Potter is a magical world in which fate (such as the house assignments made by a magical hat) at first appears to be dominant, Rowling is clear that hers is not a fate-dominated world. Professor Trelawney, the bumbling Divination teacher, almost always gets it wrong, and even though the world of Harry Potter contains magical prophecies, the prophecies come true only because people choose to act on them. Even the magical hat takes people's choices into account, as Harry reminds his son in the epilogue. Rowling herself has written that she does not believe in fate, but in "hard work and luck, and that the first often leads to the second."  Not fate, then ’ but is the outcome due to choice or chance in the end?

In piecing together the puzzle that is the conclusion of the series, it is first necessary to consider the history of the Elder Wand. The story of the Elder Wand (which is critical to Voldemort's downfall) provides the type of tightly-fitting resolution in which everything is explained. The Elder Wand is a uniquely powerful wand, but its special powers are only available to its true owner. For all others it is just a wand like any other. The Wand recognizes as its true owner only the one who has conquered its previous owner. Many Dark wizards have thought that it is necessary to kill the previous owner to gain the Elder Wand, but this is apparently not correct: Grindelwald, Dumbledore, Draco Malfoy and Harryall gained true possession of the Wand without killing the previous owner. According to legend, the past owners of the invincible Elder Wand met their downfall because they boasted about the Wand and thus attracted attention to it.Gregorovich made this mistake, leading Grindelwald to steal the Wand and defeat Gregorovich in the process. Dumbledore then gained the Wand by defeating Grindelwald.

Dumbledore was clever enough to keep his ownership of the Elder Wand secret and planned to die undefeated, so that the Wand would have no master and would no longer confer such deadly power upon an owner. Unfortunately, that "did not work as [he] intended."  Voldemort eventually found out that Dumbledore had the Elder Wand, and naturally thought that Snape, Dumbledore's killer, had become its master. However, Snape's murder of Dumbledore was arranged by Dumbledore and represented no defeat. In fact, it was Draco Malfoy ’ who had earlier disarmed Dumbledore ’ who had become the Wand's owner, though he never knew it and never actually possessed the Wand. Then, because Harry accidentally defeated Draco, Harry became the Wand's master. This lead to Voldemort's final downfall: Voldemort used the Elder Wand against Harry and was killed by the backfire of the spell as "Harry [¦] saw the Elder Wand fly high [¦] spinning through the air towards the master it would not kill." 

Voldemort's mistake in thinking that Snape rather than Draco was the master of the Wand may have been a mental lapse (overlooking Draco's disarming of Dumbledore), or it may have followed from Voldemort's Dark thinking that the Wand only recognizes the one who killed its previous owner. Even if he had known about Draco, it would not have mattered: Harry had already disarmed Draco when Voldemort found the Wand. Thus, in the end, the ownership of the Elder Wand was determined when Harry accidentally snatched Draco's wand out of his hands.