Bad Harry

It is difficult to understand what leads people to become heroes in the eyes of the public. Especially when, looked at objectively, those heroes have dubious moral and ethical motivations. No one who has risen to the historical level of hero (I suggest Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Thomas Jefferson, etc.) are exemplars of perfect virtue. All humans are flawed, but making people into heroes tends to negate these flaws or makes us like and revere people to the point where we willingly ignore them, always to our peril. Recent history has once again reminded us of the danger of hero worship, as millions decided to revere an individual who was actually inept, dangerous and violently stupid. It isn't the first time.

It will not be the last time.

And yet, heroes and their worship persist. Literature provides a perfect place to examine and challenge dominant ideological forces, especially as regards our tendency to unquestionably revere people and make them heroes. Fictional characters are malleable and we can more easily question their motivations or change our perspectives to regard them in a different light. These interesting thought experiments are not new (nor are they limited to literature, since many of our heroes are also cinematic, but for my purposes, I’ll consider cinema as a part of literature for this essay). People have been asking whether the protagonists in literature are actually good guys for a very long time.

Our subject, then, is a modern hero whose storyline is now deeply familiar to almost everyone. Like all heroes, his mythos has been read by millions and his literary (and cinematic) universe is beloved by billions. It’s no wonder. The story of The Boy Who Lived is a classic tale that has echoed across the eons. The ill-favored orphan who winds up becoming a leader and a hero who fulfills a prophecy, destroys a despot and ends a deadly regime is a very popular storyline that we can never get enough of. Luke Skywalker and King Arthur are just two, but there are aspects of this in Batman and Superman, as well.

And yet, few young adult literary heroes have had as much gravity for the modern consciousness as Harry Potter.

In a recent re-reading of the books (I read them as they were initially released and re-read them about a decade ago) I decided to take the advice of a handful of nonconformists online and tried to think about Harry not as a hero, but as a terrible, unpredictable and deeply flawed person in his own right. I didn’t bend the tales so that his enemy, the ominously named Lord Voldemort, is the good guy, however. Instead I maintained that Harry was just another main bad guy in the story.

Coming from the side of early childhood development it isn’t hard to see why Harry is actually quite damaged. As his mythos reveals, he is orphaned at a very early age and was (according to the books, anyway) about one year old when Lord Voldemort broke into his parents' home and killed them in front of Harry. He, too, is attacked, but rather than dying, he is permanently scarred, though the magic spell blows back and kills (presumably) the Dark Lord. He is rescued by wizards who—rather than taking him and raising him from his infancy as foster parents—give him to his mother’s sister’s family who hated magic, feared wizards and loathed and feared the boy.

During the early part of his life, Harry was kept in a cupboard under the stairs, fed the family’s leavings, treated like dirt and was verbally and physically abused until he was eleven years old. At no point is he ever held, comforted, read to, given gifts, played with or allowed to enjoy free time. He is despised and reviled rather than loved and he has no recourse, no means of escaping his nightmare reality. 

As he gets a bit older, he is made a servant rather than a child and is bullied endlessly by his older cousin, Dudley. When he is rescued and told that he’s actually a magic user and that he’s going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry’s aunt and uncle work very hard to prevent him even being welcomed back by the extended family that knew and loved his parents. After each school year when he has to return to his surrogate family, he is abused and maligned even more than before.

Any human child subjected to this in the real world would have a very difficult time growing into a fully-functioning, well-rounded adult and would always show the gaps in their development. Perhaps intentionally, Harry’s author shows these gaps, but we readers likely don’t recognize them for what they actually are, because we’re too busy rooting for Harry to win. This is because we feel akin to Harry or, if not, we understand the injustice of his situation. We’re used to cheering against the bad guys, and so we hope for the destruction of Harry’s awful family and his enemies. In one scene, when Harry is being badly treated once again by his surrogate family, this time at the zoo, he makes a glass pane disappear on the exhibit of a Burmese Python so that his cousin falls in and is put in mortal danger. An outsider might (ignoring the magical elements) see this as the act of a very unhealthy young person who needs help. However, we support Harry’s actions and we are righteously indignant at the treatment he received.

This is just one of many times that Harry puts other people in danger for his own gain or for revenge (or both). He quite often lies, cheats, manipulates people, breaks the rules, disregards the authority of school staff, ignores his friends’ safety, focuses his rage on people (who regularly earn it) and is always compulsively looking for ways to get revenge for mistreatment.

Harry is kept in check by his two best friends Hermione Granger and Ronald Weasely but he frequently disregards their warnings and continually expects them to put their own lives in danger so that he can solve a mystery (read: get revenge on Voldemort). Although not the only character of dubious personality (Harry’s author quite eloquently creates many deeply flawed characters who act as real humans do, seeking their own interests) Harry in this reading becomes a kind of intolerable black hole of misery for the people around him. In one book, The Order of the Phoenix, Harry spends the entire story raging at the people who love him and burning bridges with people who are trying to keep him safe while endangering them and in one case, even putting his Godfather in an ultimately fatal situation. When, at the end of the book, he is accosted by the school's headmaster, who wishes to console Harry’s loss, Harry just rages some more and breaks up the office.

By the end of the books, Harry does realize that he has the ability to destroy Lord Voldemort and he also begins to take stock of just how much his friends have sacrificed to put him in the role of The Chosen One. He even begins to see how much of a problem he has been to his friends who, on several occasions, become so angry at his single-minded drive, that he is actually forced to take personal inventory and change his tack in order to maintain their friendships.

Much like anyone subjected to the trauma and loss Harry faces in the stories, he becomes an empty shell of a person. He is never really able to become an individual in his own right, nor does he recognize his own value outside of the battle between dark and light magic, until well after he destroys Lord Voldemort. His only sense of meaning is what has been foisted upon him in his youth for the battle. As such he is much more like a sociopath who mirrors other people’s behavior to fit in rather than someone who actually has and feels emotions. His rigorously immoral behavior, ignorance of consequences, lack of a moral compass beyond his own desires and flat refusal to value other people's feelings are all on display in each book. His anti-social disorder is also obvious in the way that he treats his love interests early in the stories.

I’d make the argument that Harry is actually a psychopath. He has no trouble killing and frequently does so, either directly or by failing to save people or by failing to obey necessary boundaries that keep the rest of his friends from using magic to harm. In the first book, in order to save himself from a situation he never should have been in, he kills a teacher at the school. He never shows regret for this, since the teacher in question was in league with Lord Voldemort. It was most assuredly a "kill-or-be-killed" scenario, so we actually wish to absolve Harry of his culpability, but he never should have been involved at all. Harry was eleven years old.

He kills several people, in fact more than any other wizard except the Dark Lord. It is, of course, important to acknowledge that three of these four people were magical variants of Voldemort, but then, murder is murder. By the time the books close on Harry as an adult, he has caused more chaos, ruined more lives, killed or injured more people and all by the time he’s 18. All of it might be forgiven, considering the odds, the fact that he became a tool to be used against evil and that he was part of a prophecy he didn't make, except that Harry rarely shows any remorse for his actions and is actually given carte blanche by the headmaster of the school to do as he wishes with very few serious consequences. Giving free reign to people with dangerous personality disorders and horribly traumatic childhoods isn't the ideal soul in which to sow the seeds of heroism.

Anyone reading this who is a Harry Potter fan (and I am one, believe me) will no doubt be fuming at my description, but they might be hard pressed to actually show that I’m wrong. They might say, “but Harry is a good guy!” or “Harry did what he had to do!”. This is true, but I don’t think it is sufficient to negate the thesis: Harry is too flawed to be a good guy.

When we revere characters, we do so at the risk of ignoring their flaws, which often far overshadow their virtues. However, to assuage the hurt feelings of those people upset with this essay, I can submit two things that actually may help to redeem Harry, at least in part.

First, people in the stories love him. Not that being a psychopath prevents people liking him, per se, but the people who actually do love Harry and treat him well earn his slightly inhuman loyalty. Once he makes a connection, he is devoted to that person even when he is fighting with them. Second, of course, is Harry’s bravery. Courage is a virtue that eliminates other flaws. No one stops to ask whether those running toward danger are good people. We assume they are, because of their bravery. The chief personality trait which lands Harry in his school house (Gryffindor) is his fearlessness. Fear likely was burned out of him by his unbelievably awful childhood, but he nonetheless is a very courageous character, who shuns cowardice and loathes it in his friends. Yet, that bravery likely is born in his inability to see consequences and his impulsive desire to get revenge.

Despite the awful consequences of this experiment (I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to see Harry as a good guy again) I do think that there is a valuable lesson in it. It doesn’t take much to swing ourselves out of the gravity of public opinion far enough to challenge our strongly-held beliefs. It has also helped me to mistrust my tendency to idolize people, especially those people that everyone else agrees are good and honorable just because they're popular. 

I reserve the right to make up my own mind. However, any discussion about literature is a good discussion that sharpens the critical faculties and encourages literacy. In that case, this is a worthy exercise, even if it does wind up being quite upsetting for fans (including me).