Reader discretion is advised for unhinged stream of consciousness reaction to chapter.

Summary

The fourth chapter opens with the introduction of Hagrid, the keeper of keys and grounds at Hogwarts, whose job title is eponymous to the chapter’s title. Because in late-stage capitalism, our value-generating function in an exploitative market economic system is all we need to know about a person.

Much of this chapter is spent with Harry being punched in the face by facts about his parents (murdered), the Wizarding World (patriarchy), the concept of a Muggle (which feels like a slur considering it’s spelled with two g’s in the middle), and Voldemort - the guy who murdered Harry’s parents and whose name wizards and witches fear to say aloud (dumb).

The fourth chapter ends with Harry struggling to accept that he is a wizard (the self-doubt doesn’t last long), the Dursleys resisting Harry going to Hogwarts (with limited success), and Hagrid conjuring a pig’s tail on Dudley (fat-shaming) in a fit of cruel, misdirected anger in response to Uncle Vernon characterizing Dumbledore, Hogwarts’ headmaster, as a crack-pot. A claim that was legitimized, not debunked, from this reader’s perspective over the course of the series.

Reaction

They say good writers don’t need adverbs to effectively describe the way a character is saying something.

I described that adage pretty smartly.

So when Rowling starts the fourth chapter by describing Dudley Dursley asking a question “stupidly”, she is being pretty dumb and lazy.

But maybe she isn’t being dumb and lazy. Maybe Rowling is doing it intentionally.

Maybe it’s more about the story and the world than about the characters and their humanity being realized.

Maybe everyone in JK Rowling’s Wizarding World is a tool or simply a means to an end in telling the story she wants told.

Maybe it doesn’t matter what Harry Potter’s opinions are about Fruit of the Loom-brand underwear or Israel’s genocide of Palestinians or the Arab-supremacist genocide of black people in Sudan.

Maybe that dimensionality or complexity beyond the character’s narrative function does not matter.

Maybe it actually makes the story harder to tell if we’re confronted, or inundated, with a character’s paradoxes, dissonances, and humanity.

Maybe genuine confrontation with a protagonist’s moral fragility or being made to feel compassion for an antagonist calls into question too many things about what we believe and how we see ourselves.

Maybe that form of storytelling is too uncomfortable because it shows us how untenable and amorphous our concepts of justice are and how empty our indictments of injustice are.

Maybe this is the crux of tribalism and why it is so hard to see “us” in “them”.

Maybe we prefer to “other” them.

Maybe it helps us justify why we are not them and why they are there and why we are here.

Maybe it’s easier to create and digest concepts of “us” and “them” than considering if there is even an “i” that exists in relation to anyone or anything.

Maybe we are still clinging on to comfort and pleasure and ease and ego when we believe that we’ve conceded to nihilism or powerlessness.

Maybe nothingness isn’t the end, but actually the beginning.

Or maybe.

Maybe Dudley Dursley just asks stupid questions stupidly and we should shut the fuck up and Free Palestine before we have to Remember Palestine. Other stuff happened in the chapter. Mostly dialogue. I really hope this doesn’t feel like AI-slop.

Review

I’ll probably retract this statement at some point, but I think this may have been the hardest chapter for Rowling to get right in the entire series. Up until this point, it was two worlds in parallel play with pipes being laid about who Harry Potter is as a character, not his identity. But in this chapter, the two worlds were brought together to actually start the story. And I think it was done poorly.

This chapter falls apart with the manufactured rage from Hagrid “discovering” how little Harry Potter knows about the Wizarding World and himself. Hagrid should not be upset or surprised that Harry knows nothing; Dumbledore told Hagrid that Harry probably doesn’t know much. Beyond this, there was clear resistance to Harry entering the Wizarding World. Harry not knowing anything about the Wizarding World and himself is the plot device used to bring the two worlds together to actually start the story. Hagrid’s rage was disingenuously manufactured to have that plot device carried out the way it was. It undermined Hagrid’s relationship with Dumbledore, Hagrid’s value as a reliable interlocutor, and it called into question how Dumbledore is being presented as intelligent, beneficent, and powerful.

Summary

School is over and summer is upon the Dursley household, featuring Harry Potter. The chapter begins with preparations being made for Harry and Dudley to attend separate schools for the new academic year. Harry will be going to the local public school and Dudley to an elite private school where little white boys participate in mild homoeroticism by poking each other with walking sticks. Why else do adolescent boys need walking sticks if not to have an outlet for their suppressed sexual aggression towards one another?

The bulk of the chapter is escalating attempts at a letter being delivered to Harry being matched with equally absurd preventative measures being taken to refuse Harry reading the letter. For example, the Dursleys escape to an abandoned shack on a rock in the middle of a sea to avoid Harry reading the letter. Which seems a little excessive even if the letter is explicit instructions for Harry to kill the entire Dursley family.

The chapter ends with the clock striking midnight to mark Harry’s 11th birthday and someone knocking at the door of the shack at that exact moment. The thrill of the countdown to Harry’s birthday served no narrative function.

Reaction

This chapter has not aged well. Rowling presents Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia as being anxious about the surveillance they are getting and paranoid about the information known of the circumstances under which Harry is living. Under modern, surveillance capitalism, circumstances, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would be loving the attention and the feeling of importance they are getting through Harry - they’d probably make a TikTok series out of it.

More than anything, this chapter presents Uncle Vernon as having love and devotion to his family that ought to make most husbands and fathers feel inadequate. He risks his physical and mental health, security, comfort, and livelihood to protect his wife and child from another child getting a letter delivered. Because that is literally all of the information we are given by the end of this chapter. That Uncle Vernon has gone insane because he doesn’t want a 10 year-old, malnourished, post-colonialism, British boy to read a letter. Post-colonialism is included here to emphasize Harry being, emotionally, neutered.

Review

One of the hardest things I imagine writers have to deal with is balancing the trade-off between character consistency and narrative progression. It happens a lot in this chapter. The television writer, Greg Daniels, said “you don’t eat your seed corn” to discuss this trade-off. Which is to say, you should not sell-out your character for a great joke or to move things along in the story because you don’t know when or how you’ll need the character later on in the story.

Uncle Vernon, until this point, is not an avoidant person and he is definitely not someone who would overpower Aunt Petunia about decisions surrounding Harry. In the first chapter, he was scared to bring up Aunt Petunia’s family. When he did, she had complete dominance over the emotional levels of that conversation. Yet, in this chapter, he is paranoid and, most importantly, dismissive of any input Aunt Petunia has on the situation.

All of this is done to build out the fantastical world that the Dursleys are not a part of. Rowling does this with increasingly ridiculous methods of delivering a letter matched by increasingly ridiculous methods of avoiding the receipt of the letter. And in the process of doing this, she takes liberties with Uncle Vernon’s character.

Summary

To paraphrase J.K Rowling, nearly 10 years have passed since the Dursleys had woken up to find their nephew on their front step. To illustrate the passage of time, she (what I’m guessing is Rowling’s pronoun of choice, given social discourse) presents the fixation and ornamentation of the Dursley household on Dudley’s growth from a large pink beach ball of a baby, into a fat boy. You could say that he aged like a Twinkie, but Dudley probably ate the Twinkie before it could age.

Rowling spends much of this chapter describing the miserable conditions of neglect and abuse in which Harry Potter is living and uses Dudley’s birthday celebrations as an indicator of it – a day where normal families would distribute care and attention equally to all children regardless of whose birthday it is. The chapter ends with Harry casually dialoguing with a snake leading to a series of extraordinary events that defy the laws of physics for which even the zookeeper could not provide an explanation for.

Reaction

Where the hell does Harry Potter get the self-esteem from to talk back and express sarcasm to his aunt and uncle? He has spent his entire consciousness being sat on by them – both literally, and metaphorically. Especially considering that the only thing he likes about himself is a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead – probably because it made him feel special and different. What a hipster-doofus.

Based on how he’s been treated, every answer Harry gives to something the Dursleys say should be either “yes” or “not yet”. Imagine how big of a prick he would be with this innate self-esteem if he had even semi-supportive guardians. Dudley is a real one; he knows that little boys can’t cry when their boys are around. However, for some reason, he’s able to count to 36 confidently but unable to add 2 to 36. Clearly, Rowling hates the person Dudley is based on and just wants to make them look unnecessarily stupid.

Also, how the hell does the Brazilian boa constrictor know any Portuguese if it was bred in captivity in the United Kingdom? Get real, Rowling…

Review

As the chapter closes, Rowling coalesces Harry’s misery and existential dread with powerful catharsis. The people he lives with treat him horribly, refuse to offer him any sense of self or connection to his family, and proactively deny any flourishing. The build-up to this is excellent, starting from the only information Harry has of his parents is that they died in a car accident and that if Harry himself suddenly died, virtually nothing about number 4 Privet Drive would change. Except that Uncle Vernon would have fewer things to complain about.

The transition to the summary was powerful with Rowling planting the seeds of Harry’s longing for connection back to the beginning of the chapter when he was dreaming about the flying motorcycle that he arrived on. It’s these seeds that make the peculiar interactions that Harry reminisces about with witches and wizards that he does not know, more meaningful.

Lastly, the relationship between Uncle Vernon and Dudley, in this chapter, seems strange and difficult to believe. Aunt Petunia would want to believe she bred a perfect child, and that Dudley could do no wrong. However, Uncle Vernon is stern and presented to avoid showing weakness. And yet, he continuously caves to Dudley’s whims (good publication) and offers no counterbalance to Aunt Petunia “babying” their child.

Summary

The story opens by laying the pipes of a willing and actively troglodytic family that marry the extremes of the human physique and procreate a symbolic incarnation of the human condition; a maleficent, obtuse, and pathologically reactionary, baby. We are then introduced to a parallel world to ours that is extraordinary and fantastical but subject to the same plot devices; fear, insecurity, and a powerful white man that keeps things together.

In spite of the gross lack of semi-colons in the first chapter relative to that first paragraph, the actively troglodytic family and extraordinary parallel world are connected like two clauses by the English language’s most misunderstood punctuation. To this end, the family of a baby boy in the extraordinary parallel world is assassinated and he is made to live with his only living relatives: the aforementioned family of exceptionally ordinary troglodytes. A classic premise for a sitcom – the original odd couple!

Reaction

First of all, “The Boy who Lived” as a title? Stupid. Harry Potter survived. You say someone “lived” when they have a tale to tell. At this point in the story, Harry Potter is a stupid baby who couldn’t even tell you the difference between a tale, a tail, and a worm (foreshadow).

Next, what is the deal with this random wizard that refers to Voldemort as “You-Know-Who” to Mr. Dursley, a person who definitely does not know who “You-Know-Who” is? That wizard knows that Mr. Dursley is a muggle and that they could not know who “You-Know-Who” is. He is essentially celebrating with a blind person that the sun finally came out. At best, he’s an idiot. At the very least, he’s an asshole.

Lastly, why the hell is some random teacher, and his bumbling pet, responsible for the adoption process of a child immediately following the assassination of his parents at the hands of a war criminal and terrorist? Spoiler alert: this is never answered.

Review

For the opening chapter of the series, Rowling seamlessly shifts the tone from the start to finish – beginning with a silly caricature of the Dursley family, transitioning to a tense and pregnant dialogue between husband and wife and ending with a solemn toast of an oppressed people across a country. As a result, she is able to effectively interweave a world parallel to ours that becomes accessible by a shared fragility and response to a changing sense of security.

In her attempt to establish the Albus Dumbledore character, I think Rowling tries to do too much too soon. Within a few exchanges in dialogue, he is shown to be whimsical, beneficent, omniscient, and omnipotent, yet unable to address 11 years of terror at the hands of Voldemort. Rowling does little to introduce or justify Dumbledore’s role in the story by prioritizing the revelation of his persona. More of what Dumbledore is capable of could have been revealed as the story progresses allowing for simple questions to be answered like why he was the one to decide what happens to Harry and how he got that authority.

The dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Dursley did an amazing job of showing the subtle distinction between their perspectives. They are both presented as ardently striving for normalcy at the beginning of the chapter. However, from the anxious conversation that Mr. Dursley initiates, it becomes clear that while he hates things being out of the ordinary, Mrs. Dursley in fact hates her sister for being extraordinary. This contradiction is betrayed when she expresses hatred for her nephew’s name as being “common”. This dialogue, as much as the one between Dumbledore and McGonagall, lays the pipe for the rest of the story to allow for depth to these characters and complexity for the world that Harry will be entering.