Character Analysis: How Harry Potter Grows

“Dumbledore’s man through and through, aren’t you, Potter?” (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 348). Trust is the spine of Harry Potter’s character. When Dumbledore speaks, Harry listens; when Dumbledore warns him off, he obeys. But trust alone doesn’t explain how the boy who arrived at Hogwarts at eleven becomes the man who walks into the forest at seventeen. Growth does. And Harry’s growth comes from the decisions he makes at each stage of his life: as a child, a teenager, a student, and finally a man.

Harry begins as a friendly, curious child, and curiosity is his first engine. It draws him to the third-floor corridor in his first year, where he stops Voldemort from reclaiming the stone that grants immortal life. In his second year it draws him into the Chamber of Secrets through a haunted diary, and he saves Ron’s sister. Along the way he gathers the people who will carry him: Ron, Hermione, and his godfather Sirius. The lesson of these years is double-edged. Curiosity is a gift. Used without caution, it’s a liability.

Then the war finds him and turns him into a brave, hard-pressed teenager. Someone enters his name in a deadly tournament, and he competes or he forfeits. He survives the graveyard, watches a friend die, and escapes with his life. A year later the Ministry calls him a liar while Voldemort invades his very mind, baits a trap, and kills Sirius in front of him. Nobody would call these good years. But they’re the years he learns strength the only way it can be learned: by surviving his own mistakes.

In his sixth year, the student emerges. The private lessons with Dumbledore are nominally about Voldemort’s history, but they are really an apprenticeship in trust and determination. Harry learns about the Horcruxes, the fragments of soul that anchor Voldemort to life, and commits himself to destroying every one of them. Then Snape kills Dumbledore on the tower, and the lesson turns brutal: trusting someone doesn’t protect you from losing them. Harry carries on anyway.

Carrying on is what makes him a man. While dark wizards take over the Ministry, he hides, hunts Horcruxes, and sticks with the decision he made at Dumbledore’s side. The trail leads back to Hogwarts, where the final battle begins, and to the discovery he has been dreading: he himself is a Horcrux. So he does the thing the whole series has been building toward. He sacrifices himself, because it is right. The killing curse strikes him; the fragment of Voldemort’s soul inside him dies instead; and Harry comes back to end it. Determination and doing right, he proves, can defeat the most powerful dark wizard of all time.

Harry grew from a child into a teenager, a good student, and a man because of the choices he made, not the choices made for him. Brave, a true friend, strong, trustworthy, and trusting: each was a decision, repeated until it became character. He stands as a study in independence held together by trust in others.

And yet. Can a person just rely on trust?

Based on an original post by Madi at MuggleNet.