2012年3月23日星期五

Meaningful Death and Meaningless Eternity - A response to "Harry Potter and the Fear of Death"


This is a response to Andreia De Freita’s recent post “Harry Potter and the Fear of Death”:
Andreia De Freita’s post:
I am a huge harry potter fan myself, so when I see the title, “Harry Potter and the Fear of Death”, I just feel so interested to read it. All the books in Harry Potter series show the same storyline, which is the battle between Harry Potter and Voldemort. In these stories, Harry is fighting against Voldemort, the monster, as well as against death.

Voldemort could be seen as a “monster” figure, he is half-life wizard, he was human, and became a sort of monster when he split his soul into various parts in order to get immortality. Although he is not belonged to any unversally known “monster” groups, and he is certainly not attempting to get any redemption. This makes me think about how should we define “monsters” in Christianity anyway, I think maybe hybrid of good and evil is a way to do it.

The monsters motif in popular culture always come with death, they are threatening, and they are pronouns of death. In Harry Potter series, especially the last several books, the death is everywhere in the novel. Voldemort killed lots of people for his own eternal life. People sacrificed for his fear of death, this makes the death becomes meaningful while the immortality becomes meaningless. The whole signal of death and fear of death came out with the theme in Harry Pottery.

As Freita said, in Christianity, lots of elements in Harry Potter are not welcomed, such as the magic, escaping from death or even “live” his half-life because he committed an act against nature. But popular culture seems build up a connection with those conflicts, brings things which seems never will be existed on same stage into one theme. The death motif in popular culture has productive function for being presented, as well as the monsters, learning from them, we understand what is being alive, and we understand what is being human. 

没有评论:

发表评论