finitum non capax infiniti

This post will probably spoil the story for those who have not finished the Harry Potter series. Consider yourself warned.

Yesterday I wrote about one of reasons I think that Rowling’s Harry Potter series is so successful (besides the fact that the story line is captivating and the books are very well written). That reason was the longing for justice that we all feel as we are all living in a broken world.

Another reason I think people are attracted to the books (and movies) is that many of the main characters (just like real teenagers) are struggling with questions concerning their identity and their purpose. Who are they? Who do they long to be? What drives them? What are they driving towards? These are all questions that, I’m sure, we have thought about ourselves; questions that tap into what it means to be a human. We all want to ‘belong,’ we all want a purpose. Reading the Harry Potter series gives us a voyeuristic view into the lives of fictional characters as they struggle with the same questions.

Many people can identify with Ron Weasley. Here is a kid who is living in the shadows of three very successful brothers (who were Prefects, Head Boys, and Quidditch stars) and two popular brothers. He feels the pressure of living up to his own name, of doing and being what his older brothers did and were. This journey of fulfilling his dreams of living up to his brothers is sidetracked when he becomes best friends with Harry Potter, the most famous wizard-boy who ever lived (in fact, he was “The Boy Who Lived”). Ron then struggles between one of Hagrid’s rock cakes and a hard place: Harry is getting all the attention that Ron was striving for in order to live up to his brother’s example, yet he is also best friends with Harry. Where is he doing to find his identity? Is it as Potter’s red-headed sidekick; or is it a road that he is going to have to travel without Harry? Will his parents love him even if he doesn’t live up to Bill, Charles, and Percy’s achievements? First he was in the shadows of his brothers and now he is in the shadow of his best friend.

Hermione also struggles with her own identity. She sets herself up as being smarter than everyone else, almost to make up for the fact that she was ‘muggle-born.’ She becomes best friends with Harry and Ron who have made it a habit to bend the rules. How can she keep up her identity and reputation while continually breaking rules with Harry and Ron? How can she really ‘grow up’ into womanhood when her two best friends don’t seem to really notice that she is, in fact, a girl (that is, until Victor Krum notices first).

Harry, of course, has the greatest struggle with identity and purpose. He is already known throughout the wizarding world as the one who stopped ‘You Know Who’ when he was a child. He finds himself stepping into another world that he knows next to nothing about and being pressured to fill the expectations of other people. Over and over again in the story he gets to the point where he is frustrated by this fact. He never asked for this; this was something that was thrown onto him by someone else. Why should he have to live up to something that he really had no control over? Why should people expect him to be the savior when the only special thing to happen to him, from his perspective, is that the most evil wizard of all time murdered his parents and tried to murder him? Does he find his identity in his struggle with Voldemort, or does he brush it to the side and create his own identity? Does his find his purpose in saving the wizarding world from evil, or does he find his purpose in ‘following his heart’ and doing what feels right to him?

Everyone can identify with these struggles (and even more that are in the books that I haven’t mentioned). Of course, not literally; but we all struggle with figuring out who we are and what we are here for. Rowling’s presentation of these struggles and the ardent desire to find the answers is one more of the many reasons why the Harry Potter books have been so successful.