This third installment of the Harry Potter series introduces a major conflict between Ron and Hermione, which ignites before the school year even begins. Like morality, justice is not cut-and-dry simple, a lesson that Harry is forced to learn throughout the novel, and something he comes more fully to understand as the series goes on. On a smaller scale, justice can be seen in Harry sparing Pettigrew’s life and in Harry forgiving Sirius.
A microcosm of this major theme is the trial of Buckbeak, which demonstrates that influence, wealth, and power (as wielded by Lucius Malfoy) have more stock with the Ministry than whether or not someone is guilty or innocent. The criminal justice system has failed Sirius and, by proxy, Harry. Besides that, Peter Pettigrew’s escape toward the end of the novel destroys any possibility of a trial in the future. Harry and his friends and readers know that Sirius is innocent, but the Ministry was too concerned with keeping their image to even give Sirius a simple trial after the initial crime, the night Voldemort killed James and Lily Potter.
The order of justice-or what you, personally, perceive as justice-does not always line up with reality. JusticeĪlong with the idea of a moral grey area, Harry is confronted with the fact that the criminal justice system and the government-and, by extension, the adults that run it-are not infallible. Since Patronuses can only be powered by the happiest of memories, it is easy to see what Rowling is saying, here: you won't sink into despair or lose yourself in fear if you remember the happy, light things in your life that motivate you to keep fighting. At the same time, the Patronus charm is introduced as a way to physically combat the Dementors Patronuses are inherently good, light things, battling fear and darkness and giving Harry a power he had not previously possessed. Voldemort, though notably not present in the novel, looms in the distance Harry, for the first time, must confront the night his parents died and the complex betrayals that led to the tragedy. The ominous and omnipresent Dementors are Rowling’s way of introducing a more tangible and adult version of the fear and trauma that Harry has endured in his life. The fact that Harry's greatest fear is a Dementor attack means that his greatest fear is that which instills fear-in other words, he fears "fear itself," as the popular adage goes. Once Harry encounters a Dementor, they become his greatest fear (as demonstrated by the fact that the Boggart turns into a Dementor when Harry faces it). The feeling of fear assumes a physical form with the introduction of Dementors, creatures who feed on hope and happiness and instill fear in anyone they approach. His idealized vision of his father is suddenly challenged by a plausible story of someone who he loathes, Professor Snape.
Harry has to account for this new information and consider the idea that his father, who died while Harry was still an infant, and who he only knew through photos and the stories told by those closest to him, might not be as perfect as he thought he was.
He was saving his own skin as much as mine" (p. There was nothing brave about what he did. He says, "Have you been imagining some act of glorious heroism? Then let me correct you-your saintly father and his friends played a highly amusing joke on me that would have resulted in my death if your father hadn't got cold feet at the last moment. He says, "I know the truth, all right? He saved your life! Dumbledore told me! You wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for my dad!" (p. Harry and his friends are thirteen now, breaching adulthood, and the new cast of significant characters forces them to question their ideas of cut-and-dry, black-and-white morality.Ī shining example of this new perspective is when Harry challenges Snape's claims that his father, James Potter, was "exceedingly arrogant." Harry tells Snape to shut up.
In The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry begins to understand that the world is not divided into a simple binary of good versus evil or people who do only good things or only bad things.