The Letters from No One, reviewed
Reviewing the third chapter of Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone
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.
