Failing to fill a reader’s expectations is what makes great literature. Rowling deceives her reader’s expectations especially in the first two books of the Harry Potter series. In The Sorcerer’s Stone, Snape seems to be the antagonist of the story; the evidence perfectly sets up the reader against Snape. Hermione sees him muttering words, believed to be a curse, while Harry struggles on his broomstick. Snape has wounds from trying to sneak past Fluffy, the guardian of the philosopher’s stone. In The Chamber of Secrets, the malevolence of Tom Riddle isn’t revealed until the end of the novel. Another character that deceives Harry and the reader is Gilderoy Lockhart, a fraud who brags of his false encounters with the dark arts. Both of the first two novels dupe the reader by character portrayals—people aren’t who they appear to be. By the end of the novel, the reader discovers the truth of a character’s background or actions. Rowling sets up expectations and fails to fill them. In this way, her novels contain elements of the mystery genre. It motivates the reader into exploring the past and the present of her wizard world.
When I read Harry Potter and other enjoyable novels, I do become ‘occupied by the thoughts of the author’ as Iser suggests in “The Reading Process.” While I’m relying on the thoughts of the narrator, a part of my personality drifts away as I become more and more involved with the story. However, I am still responsible for the imagination that produces the story in my head. It’s one thing to read some text, and it’s another thing to comprehend a text within the boundaries of my own imagination. I believe reading fiction like Harry Potter is two-fold. Rowling is responsible for producing text from her own imagination, while I’m responsible for restructuring it to fit my own imaginative preferences. That’s the joy of reading—it’s a relationship between two imaginations. This reader-response style of criticism describes this process of interpretation.
No comments:
Post a Comment