Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Chapter Notes

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Chapter 15: Beauxbatons and Durmstrang

• “I reckon I just imagined my scar hurting, I was half-asleep when I wrote to you last time. There’s no point coming back, everything’s fine here. Don’t worry about me, my head feels completely normal.” – How did the Sorting Hat ever consider Harry to be sorted into Slytherin when he can’t even tell a proper lie? Oh, you sweet innocent summer child.

• Sulky Hedwig makes me think she was a cat in one of her former lives.

• I wonder why Moody/Crouch Jun. put the students under the Imperius Curse and showed them how to resist it. What is the purpose? Was he curious to know how strong Harry is? If the rumours were true and there was something special about the boy who lived? To report it back to Voldemort that Harry was strong enough to resist? Why the need to prepare Harry for something that could be an advantage in his fight against Voldemort? Or was Crouch Jun. so convinced Harry would never stand a chance that it didn’t matter if he could resist the Curse?

• Harry is the only one in the class able to resist the Curse, which is astonishing, given that many older and more advanced wizards and witches aren’t able to do it. Harry is, given his talent as a wizard, quite good, but not perfect (that would be Hermione). However he is extraordinary gifted when it comes to spells that require a strong will. He was able to cast a Patronus with 13, he can resist the Imperius Curse at age 14, both things most adult wizards can’t do. And this is something that can’t be taught, it is a matter of character. It is how he survived a war.

• Hermione is obviously right in pointing out that the use of the Curse against other humans is illegal, even if used in class. Moody/Crouch Jun. again uses Dumbledore as a justification, saying Dumbledore wants them to know what it feels like. Which again, I think is unlikely. In the end a disguised Death Eater uses an Unforgivable Curse right at Hogwarts against the students, one of them being Harry Potter, and gets away with it.

• “‘The way he talks,’ Harry muttered, as he hobbled out of the Defence Against the Dark Arts class an hour later […], ‘you’d think we were all going to be attacked any second.’” – That’s the big irony of it: how Moody/Crouch Jun. prepared them for a war only he knew was about to start. And some of his paranoia, of his constant vigilance, becomes part of Harry, of the anxiety that will follow him all through his fifth year, to the point where he starts his own guerrilla group to prepare others for the war that is to come.

• And Ron has the biggest trouble resisting the curse, as he had always been the most innocent and immature of their group.

• “‘It’s all in Hogwarts: A History. Though, of course, that book’s not entirely reliable. “A Revised History of Hogwarts” would be a more accurate title. Or “A Highly Biased and Selective History of Hogwarts, Which Glosses Over the Nastier Aspects of the School”.’” – Hermione is someone who deeply trusts authorities, in the form of teachers but also in the form of books. Her dismissing Professor Trelawney was the first time she didn’t show respect to a teacher, and I think this the first time she questions the authority of a book (especially one only she had read). She trusts books to be correct and to give her undeniable facts. And the fact that “Hogwarts: A History” deliberately left out some facts is like a personal affront to her. No book is ever completely objective, no narrative ever tells the entire truth, because it is simply impossible. And it is an important lesson every reader has to learn.