Harry James Potter

Families

Married

• Spouse: Ginevra Molly Weasley (m. 9999-12-31)

Parents

• Family: Married
  • Birth Father: James Potter
  • Birth Mother: Lily J Evans
• Family: Married
  • Adoptive Father: Vernon Dursley
  • Adoptive Mother: Petunia Evans

Ancestors

Analysis

Harry as Unreliable Narrator

The Harry Potter series is, with very few exceptions, third-person limited from Harry’s point of view. This is easy to forget, and it has profound consequences for how we read the books. Harry is not an objective observer — he is an abused child who has learned to hide his reactions, who associates attention with pain, and who filters everything we see through that lens.

Consider what the narration skips. The books jump over weeks and occasionally months where nothing “significant” happens. We never see Harry attending the Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw Quidditch game, for example. We do not see the bulk of his daily interactions with anyone. But it is in these non-significant times that Harry would be growing in relationship with all the rest of his classmates, year mates, and housemates. He would be at meals with them, in the library working on assignments around them, in the common room hanging out. They are living in close proximity for ten months of each year, and yet at the formational meeting for the DA, Harry is apparently unsure of Susan’s name, despite the fact that she has been in his herbology class for four years at that point.¹ I had 280 people in my high school class, and by the end of senior year, I probably had a few that I did not immediately recognise by name, even though many I knew nothing else about them, but most of them I knew at least that much. It is crazy to think that, with only forty people in his class, Harry did not learn at least their last names and faces (since the professors mostly use last names).

This does not make sense if we take the narration at face value. It does make sense if we recognise that Harry self-isolates so profoundly that his classmates do not settle into distinct individuals in his mind. He is not really a classmate to them — he is “The Boy Who Lived” and they go out of their way to see him in the halls while making no effort to disguise the fact that they are talking about him incessantly.² Even if this persisted only a short time, it made a profound impression on Harry, who comes from a background where attention is associated with pain. They are not really people to him because he is not really a person to them. Why this is the case — the effects of his upbringing on his ability to form relationships — is discussed elsewhere.

The same lens explains other oddities. The time skips are not just a narrative convenience; they reflect a narrator who does not register the ordinary. The books show us what Harry considers significant, and Harry’s sense of what matters is warped by his history. See my overview on Shipping for how this affects our ability to evaluate his relationships.

Appearance

On a truly trivial note, the scene from Snape’s memory showing the confrontation after the OWL tests shows that James purposefully messed up his hair.³ Harry’s hair is unfix-ably messy. Unfortunately, we know that while James did mess up his hair, it was also unfix-ably untidy.⁴ The most likely explanation of this is that it is purely genetic, but lots of authors have had fun speculating a magical origin for this hair. I read one idea that I found really amusing, that Harry’s hair was a prank that James played on Lily.⁵ As I said, the book 1 evidence probably contradicts the theory, but it is a great one.

At the beginning of book 5, we read that Harry “was a skinny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who had the pinched, slightly unhealthy look of someone who has grown a lot in a short space of time.”⁶ Since at the end of book four we know that James Potter was still taller than Harry,⁷ either this growth spurt happened after the graveyard scene (despite Harry’s poor diet at Privet Drive), or it was insufficient to make him taller than his father. Either way, Harry observed that he is roughly the same height his father was at age 15/16 by the end of that year.⁸ So either the effects of his childhood malnutrition have been healed, or Mrs. Rowling (possibly unconsciously) chose to utterly ignore the high probability of such effects.⁹ For more on the general problem of abuse in fiction and the tension between realism and storytelling, see the dedicated discussion. Either way, we still have no clear indication of exactly how tall this is. We know only a few things definitively:

• that by the beginning of book seven, Harry is taller than Hermione and Mundungus, and shorter than Ron, Fred and George.¹⁰
• James Potter is described as tall by Riddle.¹¹

See my further comments on growth.

While some authors highly object to Harry looking so very like James, I have seen families where one or more children take very strongly after one of the two parents. Thus, this does not bother me. What does is the repeated emphasis on him having Lily’s eyes, yet he has James‘ vision. That, to me, does require explanation. Fortunately for the over analytical reader, there are reasonable, if unconfirmed, explanations available. Harry’s need for glasses is probably either an effect of from his scar, or an effect from living in the cupboard. Since both are speculation, we do not know which.