SPOILERS. OBVIOUSLY.
By the time I reached the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I was so emotionally wrung out that Harry and the gang could have joined Monty Python's Flying Circus and I wouldn't have noticed. The only part that caught my attention was the last line, because JKR had announced years ago that the last word of the last book would be 'scar,' but later modified that statement and said that the last sentence would contain the word 'scar.' Sure enough, it did (Okay, it was the second to last line, but still), and I liked the last line. I thought it was a subtle way of informing the readers that the darkness was more or less gone from Harry's life, and that the great pain/weight that had dogged him for his entire childhood had finally dissipated.
Upon rereading, however, the ending made me vaguely uneasy, and it wasn't until I heard other peoples' responses that I figured out why. This is my attempt to dissect the ending and understand my own and others' feelings about the final chapter in the Harry Potter Saga.
I think it's important to start out this dissection by acknowledging that JKR is the lord, master, and yes, god of the Harry Potter world, and therefore she can do whatever the heck she wants. While I don't always agree with authors' decisions (Ron and Hermione being a good example...no offense to them or their fans, I just can't see them as a couple) I do acknowledge that it is their world, and therefore they get to call the shots, while I should just consider myself privileged to read their stories. So, JKR was perfectly within her right to end the Harry Potter series the way she did, and I trust that she wrote the ending that felt right to her.
To understand why I felt uneasy with the ending, I thought about some of my favorite endings to series/books and tried to find the common threads. The three I picked were Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, K.A Applegate's Animorphs, and Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. (SPOILERS! OBVIOUSLY!)
His Dark Materials ends with Lyra and Will returning to their own worlds, with the assumption that they won't see each other again until they die. They're making a great sacrifice in order to repair the universe and save humanity's souls, and while they know it's the right thing to do, it doesn't mean that their hearts are any less broken. Still, they understand that this is the only option, and so they both resolve to live their lives, visiting the same bench in the Botanical Gardens in Oxford at the same time, so they stay connected. As expressed in The Amber Spyglass, they must both "build their own Republic of Heaven." The ending is sad, but it's also hopeful, because it implies that they are both going to design their own fates.
Animorphs ends with Jake, Marco, and Tobias on a likely suicidal mission to rescue Ax. Rachel is dead, and Cassie is living out her life on Earth. A lot of people dislike this ending, both because it's a cliffhanger and because many people see it as an implication that the Animorphs would rather go out fighting than try to live normal lives. However--which of the Animorphs' missions wasn't suicidal? As Marco was so fond of pointing out, everything they did was "insane." I don't think that K.A Applegate was killing her characters, I think she was sending them off on their next grand adventure. And as for Cassie not coming along, another sticking point for many fans, I think it was because Cassie was already involved in another adventure--saving the planet. Again. The Animorphs ending worked for me, because to me anyways it implied that the Animorphs would carry on forever doing the same thing they'd always done--be heroes
Finally, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle ends with Charlotte running away from her family and rejoining the crew of the Seahawk before they set sail. It doesn't say if she actually sailed off with them, or if her family caught up with her--it just ends with her climbing on deck. And this more than anything epitomizes the two main reasons why I didn't care for (There. I said it. I didn't like the end, okay?) the end of the Harry Potter series.
All three of those endings I picked have three things in common, three things that I think were missing from the end of Deathly Hallows. First, in all three endings the characters are neither entirely happy nor entirely sad. Second, in all three endings the characters are doing what they love, or at least what they believe to be the right thing. Third, and perhaps most important of all, all three stories end ambiguously.
My first issue with the ending of Deathly Hallows is that everyone seems so ridiculously happy. This is only a moment in their lives, lives that logically are varied and complex, but especially coming right after the Battle for Hogwarts, it was too much sugar too soon. Everyone, from Harry to Malfoy to Teddy Lupin to Ron and Hermione, seems content and happy. It's as if all their problems ended with Voldemort's death, after which point they all lived peaceful, normal lives. Again, obviously this isn't entirely the case, but we don't get anything but that one scene, and that scene makes it seem like their lives are all butterflies and daisies.
My second issue was closely tied to my first issue, and it was that all the main characters seemed to have cookie-cutter lives. A lot of this was confirmed in JKR's post-Potter interviews, but even in those few pages it seemed that all the main characters were happily married, with relatively stable, normal lives. Ginny as a mom seemed particularly weird to me, although quite frankly all of them as parents was just odd. Again, not blaming JKR--it just didn't work for me. It's a logical progression of their lives, but up until those last 2,000-odd words the only way I'd seen those characters was struggling to defeat evil, going on grand adventures, and fighting awesome battles against the mystical creatures and the powers of darkness. The image of them all as parents sending their 2.5 kids off to school was jarring and bizarre for me. And even knowing that they were all doing things they enjoyed, it all seemed a little too...nice, for lack of a better word. Didn't they ever get the urge to battle a dragon? To sneak into a secret government building? To solve a magical riddle? And again, maybe they did, but we don't get to see it.
If I could change just one thing about the ending, it would have been to leave the kids out. If we'd jumped five years into the future and seen them all chatting, or doing laundry, or juggling fireballs, and Hermione and/or Ginny was pregnant, that would have been fine. But seeing them as parents, with school-aged children, didn't work for me in the least. I recently read a Robert B. Parker book (he's a phenomenal mystery writer whom I can't recommend strongly enough) where two characters have a long discussion about how people change over time, despite what we want to believe. And one of the greatest catalysts for change in a person's life is becoming a parent. The children's presence took me away from the tightly woven world of Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, and his school mates, friends and enemies alike, whom I'd been following for the past decade, and dragged me out into the wider but more mundane adult world.
Like it or not, the Harry, Ron, and Hermione we see at the end of Deathly Hallows are not the same people we've been following for the whole series. Among other things, their having children fundamentally changed who they are, and that's the crux of my discomfort with the epilogue: I felt like the series didn't end with the characters I'd grown to know and love, but with a bunch of charming strangers.
Minutiae (Or other little random thoughts that didn't fit in the body of this post):
*Part of me wonders if JKR called it an epilogue specifically because she didn't want it to be thought of as part of the HP series, but as a charming add-on to satisfy readers' curiosity and give her a chance to make her characters happy. I wonder if she wanted readers to consider the denouement following the battle the final scene of the HP series.
*I don't know how I feel about Harry calling his son Albus Severus. Others have mocked the nuttiness of that name, but what bothered me was the Severus part. To me, it was very clear in "The Prince's Tale" that Snape was entirely motivated out of his love for Lily Evans--not Lily Potter. Snape felt no affection for Harry, and any protectiveness towards him was born out of guilt over Lily's death. Snape was not a saint--far from it, in fact--and his love was tainted with possessiveness and bitterness. It's telling that Snape is unable to see Dumbledore's point, that Harry is far more like Lily than like James, when it was fairly obvious to the reader from midway through the fifth book that Harry was his mother's son. The fact that Snape never saw, never even tried to see, beyond the surface shows that he's just as petty and prejudiced as we've believed him to be throughout the whole series...and Harry knows all of that. I get that he comes to see Snape as a person instead of the enemy, but giving his son Snape's name seems a bit much to me. I don't care what else Snape did--as Sirius says, the true measure of a man is how he treats those he holds power over, and as evidenced again and again throughout the books, Snape fails that test miserably. Just look at his treatment of Neville if you don't believe me.
*Speaking of naming issues, Rose and...Hugo? Sorry. It's a little thing, and not important, but those names so don't work for me. I was also sort of disappointed that Ron and Hermione's son wasn't named Fred, but I guess I'll just assume that they left that name to George and Angelina.
*Another naming issue: (And I can already hear Bug yelling at me for my obsession with names...what can I say? I find them fascinating.) I didn't like that James Potter (grandson) seemed just like James Potter (grandfather). I hate it in stories when a character carries another (usually dead) character's name, and then they end up bearing a strong resemblance to the person whose name they carry. (For instance, Anakin Solo to Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars Extended Universe, and Thom, Alanna and George's son, to Thom, Alanna's brother, in Tamora Pierce's Trickster series.) I thought a big part of the Harry Potter series was the message that we make our own choices and design our own fate, regardless of who or what others assume we're going to be/do. Having little James Potter strongly resemble older James Potter seemed to undermine that message, and even little Lily Potter resembled older Lily Potter. Again, it's just a snippet, but I didn't like the implication.
*I wanted to know more about Harry's role in Teddy Lupin's life. Aside from Dumbledore, Sirius was the most important and most influential adult in Harry's life, and even that's arguable, because Harry felt a more personal connection to Sirius, who was the closest thing Harry ever had to a loving parent. I thought it was an important and well-crafted piece of parallelism to have Harry willingly accept the role of godfather, since his godfather had such an impact on his life, and he would see it as a big and serious (pun intended!) responsibility. It makes sense to have Andromeda and Ted raise their grandson, but I wished we'd had a little more follow through on the exact nature of Harry's relationship with his godson. (UPDATE--I re-re-read the last chapter, and there's one line where someone comments that Teddy comes over for dinner three or four times a week. Works for me.)
*I have a theory that most authors are either good at beginnings or endings, but not both. There are exceptions in both directions--some are good at both, some are good at neither. But in general, most excel at one but not the other, and JKR's strength definitely lies with beginnings, not endings. Thinking about it, I realized that the endings were some of the weakest parts of all the books, with the possible exception of Half Blood Prince. Sure, the scenes leading up to the endings were generally quite good, but a lot of the endings themselves were a bit flat compared to the rest of the stories. The beginnings, on the other hand, grabbed the readers' attention and dragged them into the story, and were for the most part well done.
*Regardless of what I said above, I did not and do not totally loath the ending. In fact, there are a lot of things I like about it. Again, I think the last line works very well, and I wish the rest of the epilogue had the same subtlety as that last line. And if it had to contain children, then I like that the epilogue took place at Platform 9 and 3/4, because it did symbolize a continuing journey, and more importantly, it was the start of Harry's journey towards love and family, the entire point of the story, and now he's back in the same spot, surrounding by his loving family (including Ron, Hermione, Teddy, etc.) It did have a nice roundness to it. Finally, just a little thing, but I liked Harry and Ginny telling James to watch out for Albus. I saw it as a subtle nod to the influence the Weaselys (a caring, protecting family) had on both Harry and Ginny. It might have driven her nuts at times, but in the end Ginny was glad that she grew up with six older brothers watching her back, and she's passing the message on to her son. Similarly, Harry saw that by sticking together, the Weasleys managed to stay strong and healthy (by which I mean they came out of the entire tragedy more or less as loving and caring as they'd been at the beginning) and he's passing that message on to his own children.
--Cates
