Blog Post #2: Draco Malfoy

Draco Malfoy’s character is not shown to have a single redeeming quality in The Sorcerer’s Stone. He is portrayed as a wizard version of Dudley Dursley: a whiny bully who gets whatever he wants and has parents who indulge his every desire. Draco even talks about “bullying” his father when we first meet him. However, in chapter four of The Chamber of Secrets we discover that all is not as it seemed in the first book. We meet Draco’s father, Lucius, for the first time and we simultaneously learn both where Draco gets his pureblood mania from and that Lucius is not at all the pushover he was portrayed to be by Draco. On the contrary, Lucius has lofty expectations of his only son, expectations he doesn’t seem to think are being adequately fulfilled. For example, he scolds Draco for his low grades and, in particular, his failure to beat the muggle-born Hermione Granger on a single exam. Though it is little excuse for Draco’s antagonistic behavior, Lucius’s treatment of Draco gives the reader a reason to feel empathy for his character for the first time. He is the victim of the environment of his youth, filled with powerful wizards, dark magic, and a striking lack of humility.

It’s not until the Half-Blood Prince that a similar event occurs. Draco’s behavior in Books 2-5 continues to be unjustifiable and nasty, but in Book 6 he appears to lose his drive. In chapter twenty-one, Moaning Myrtle describes a boy who is sensitive and bullied, who feels lonely and doesn’t have anyone to talk to, and isn’t afraid to show his feelings and cry. Draco is probably the last person one would think Myrtle is describing and yet we find out later that he’s the one. This is quite a dramatic character reversal. We learn in chapter twenty-seven that the cause of this upheaval is the threat of death if he fails his mission to kill Dumbledore, and the reader is given two options: to believe Draco remains unchanged and is finally reaping what he sewed in the first five books, or to believe Draco has had an existential crisis, the result of which is that he can’t bring himself to do the only thing standing between him and the only objective he’s ever had (to kill Dumbledore and become a revered dark wizard). I choose to believe the latter, and this is reinforced by Dumbledore’s insistence that Draco is not a killer like his father and the other Death Eaters. During his cries of “He’ll kill me! He’ll kill my whole family!” I felt as much empathy for Draco as I’ve ever felt for other characters, and I was truly rooting for him to make the right choice, not just to save Dumbledore but to save Draco too. This sends the reader a strong message about nobody being beyond redemption, even after six books of depravity.