Blog Post #2-Harry Potter

To nobody’s surprise, it can be said that Harry Potter is a character that has been developing throughout the series. Having essentially grown up with Harry as each new book was released, and looking back at the end, I can see where a major theme in the series is coming of age. I never would have thought much about coming of age being a main theme in the series at the beginning, when I thought the theme would really just be good vs evil. Harry seems to have his most prominent developmental points as a character at age markers throughout the series. The very first being when the Hogwarts letters begin to arrive at Privet Drive. The first few chapters of the series we saw Harry essentially as a slave to the Dursley family, and he may also have been a bit passive in that he just did what any Dursley told him to do and did not argue it. However, as the letters from Hogwarts arrive, Harry changes to be determined to get his hands on a letter to find out what it is by trying to sneak downstairs in the night to grab one or to evade the hands of his aunt and uncle to get one when they are shooting through the house. Once Harry is retrieved by Hagrid and is re-introduced into the wizarding world, Harry had to develop to become responsible for his behavior, his money, and his academics. Upon arriving at Hogwarts and beginning classes, Harry develops even more to change from a scrawny, picked on boy that he was on Privet Drive, to a boy who has friends, a social life, and is in a place where people are not ashamed of him. Just through his first year at Hogwarts, he develops to become very brave, relatively intelligent, and maybe even a little sassy. As the years go on and Harry gets older, he develops to be able to face more and more difficult things, and in these situations he has to use his intelligence to wiggle out of increasingly complex problems. Harry developed in the series the most, I think, when at the end of the 5^th book, when Dumbledore reveals to Harry all of the information Harry needs to know about his past and about Voldemort. At this point, I think that Harry has developed from being a boy to being a man and having to understand such complex ideas and situations that someone at the age of 15 wouldn’t normally have to. Dumbledore thought that at this point, Harry was old enough to be responsible for helping solve the problem and old enough to understand what happened that created the situations he has been placed in. We can see from Harry’s character in the series that there is an appropriate age for everything, and as humans we must take responsibility for certain events, ideas, and situations at certain ages. With the coming of age comes responsibility and understanding, as Harry very much found out throughout the series.