PROBABILITY, NECESSITY, AND PREDICTABILITY

John Granger didn't post my response to his 7/27 essay "C.S. Lewis as a Goth? C'mon!" on his website, as it turns out, but on a Barnes & Noble book chat forum where he is a moderator (and I am mostly a lurker). Some nice responses to it -- but one or two people taking issue with the concepts that (a) J.K. Rowling owes anything to her audience and by extension (b) that an audience member could possibly figure out, based on that, what to expect.

So I just want to share a brief personal "Harry Potter" moment. We began, all the way back to book 1, a tradition in our house of my reading the HP books aloud to Lee and Cory. We are currently up to chapter 6 in Half-Blood Prince, just boarding the Hogwarts Express.

And Lee (also a fiction writer), who has avoided all on- and offline discussions about HPB (and who knows nothing about alchemical progressions and the like), started surmising out loud about Snape's Unbreakable Vow.

Draco's task, he figured, can't be to kill Harry. It's true that, while only Harry can kill Voldemort, any number of people could kill Harry. However, Voldemort seems to be reserving Harry to himself. Certainly any of a number of Death Eaters could have killed Harry at any time, even after the discovery and smashing of the prophecy.

So, Lee mused, it must be that Draco's task is to kill Dumbledore. It's clearly a big task, and if we go with Harry's guess that Draco was hiding a brand new Dark Mark on his arm at Madam Malkin's, it seems likely that he would have to kill someone to earn membership in the club. As in the Mafia, he would have to "make his bones." Who else at Hogwarts would be a Death Eater target? Definitely Dumbledore.

But, Lee continued, he's not sure Draco is capable of killing Dumbledore -- either because he's not that good a wizard, or because he might not have it in him. And we've already seen that Draco's own mother doesn't think he can do whatever the task is (another indication that the task is way too big for Draco to accomplish).

However, Lee pointed out, Snape has now taken an Unbreakable Vow to follow through with Draco's task, whatever it is. And we have to assume that the word "Unbreakable" means what it says -- certainly everyone involved takes it extremely seriously.

So, he concluded, at the end of the book, Draco will be in a position to kill Dumbledore, but will be unable to do so. And Snape will have to do it for him. Which, Lee pointed out, certainly puts Snape in an unassailable position with the Death Eaters, even if it might shock the Order of the Phoenix beyond all measure.

"Well?" He turned to me and asked: "Am I right?"

Taking my cue from Harry's response to Professor McGonagall and Rufus Scrimgeour at the end of HBP, I of course replied, "I can't tell you that."

But I think it goes to show how far someone can get on storytelling instincts and knowledge of probability and necessity alone, when responding to a great storyteller who knows (and follows the rules of) how to tell a great story.