I never intended to read Harry Potter. Ever. Four days after I started my internship at Walt Disney World (which, as far as I was concerned, was going to be the only theme park in Orlando that I visited), the wonderful Wizarding World of Harry Potter opened its doors to guests. My eventual visit (and purchasing of a Florida Resident Annual Pass just so I could continue visiting) led to me seeing all of the movies, so I went into the book series with countless spoilers floating around in my mind, which obviously alters the way I read the books now.
The interesting thing, though, is finding all of the tiny little details that my mind dropped somewhere. I completely forgot how Harry had interacted with Voldemort, and the drama between Ginny and Tom Riddle made more sense in the books than it did in the movie. (But that also might have been because I started watching the second movie, stupidly, after I got home from a shift that lasted until 1 in the morning.) I think that Wolfgang had a solid point in that the reader’s expectations are always changing. It definitely relates to my own reading experience because I know that, had I not seen the movies prior to reading the books, I would have constantly been changing my opinions about things. A prime example is the situation with the Heir of Slytherin. I knew all along it was Tom Riddle/Voldemort, but even reading the book I had a feeling it might have been Harry or even Draco. I was expecting for Draco to ultimately be the one in the Chamber of Secrets that had apparently died, and I never expected the Sorting Hat to tell Harry that he belonged in Gryffindor. I think it’s important to have these expectations continually changing because simply put, it keeps the entire series interesting. If things really went like they were supposed to go, the whole series would be boring (and, perhaps, nonexistent). Before the story even began, an expectation was put into place that Voldemort successfully kill Harry Potter, and he failed that expectation entirely, which started this whole series of events and completely altered an individual’s life.
Events in the series are constantly changing, and all of these events get tangled and become really complicated, and Rowling really did a great job of doing this. Yes, there are a lot of events, but they all kind of overlap in some way, and they aren’t as complicated to follow as one might think that they are. I think though, in a way, there’s something really universal in that because life can kind of be the same way, which I think helps out in the division between the reader and the writer when it comes to the story. On the first day of class, we discussed that there’s something really relatable about Harry and some of the other characters, and the way that Rowling has written the book, this assumed third person perspective kind of disappears. The whole focus goes from being someone kind of observing these events to the reader really getting a first-hand look into Harry’s thoughts and his world all while having it continue to be written in third person, which is definitely alluring in the book. The reader can easily feel what not only Harry, but Rowling's other seemingly protagonists are feeling, which goes back to the point that Wolfgang Iser makes about the reader dissolving the line between reader, writer, and the work of fiction. The reader is truly submersed into the story.
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