Harry Potter and the art of narrative misdirection
Written by Johannes Kunath
Whether you like Harry Potter or not, you can’t deny its massive success, which raises the question:
How did J.K. Rowling’s saga become so enormously successful? The answer is a multifaceted one.
One explanation could be that the theme of wizards, witches and a world full of magic has always
been fascinating. Another might be that Rowling never altered from her pre-structured plan for the
saga. Following up on that, Rowling managed to create a saga that fascinated its readership again
and again. Which is an outstanding achievement, considering the fact that she wrote seven books,
of which six have a quite similar basic outline — Harry hates his home, goes back to Hogwarts, gets
a new teacher for defense against the dark arts, has an unlikely adventure no one besides him, Ron
and Hermione would survive and in the end Gryffindor surprisingly wins the house cup. If one puts it
that way, the novels don’t really seem to be too surprising or fascinating at all.
So, another question should be: How
did J.K Rowling manage to create a
saga that fascinated its readership
every single time? The answer is,
again, a multifaceted one. But now we
talk about Rowling’s style of writing
and this is where the tools of literary
studies come into action. This is where
analysis and interpretation start.
Now, the first question you should al-
ways ask when analysing literature is
who narrates the story and why. The
easiest answer to that would be J.K.
Rowling because she is the author.
However, this isn’t quite what we are
looking for, because the first thing
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you learn in literary studies is that
the author and the narrator are two
quite different matters. As an author
you choose the ‘voice’ of the narra-
tor. This voice can be, for example, a
first-person narrator, where the nar-
rator speaks for him or herself, as in
‘Call me Ishmael’ [1], and is part of
the story he tells. Another possibil-
ity would be a third-person narrator.
Here the narrator stands somewhat
outside of the story by referring to the
characters in the story as ‘he’, ‘she’ or
‘they’. The effect of a third-person nar-
rative, as opposed to a first-person
narrative, allows for an ‘outside’ point
of view, giving the reader the idea of
an overview of the plot. This is usu-
ally enhanced when the third-person
narrator is omniscient (God-like) and
the reader sees the thoughts of every
character as well as everything that is
going on in the story. This third-per-
son omniscient narrator is a common
choice in literature. A counterpart to
that would be a third-person limited
narrator, who has only some informa-
tion about the plot and the insight into
the minds of a small amount of char-
acters (usually one).
Now this is the choice J.K. Rowling
made for her Harry Potter novels. The
narrator informs the reader about