Snape Kills Dumbledore Knowing That It Will Result In His Own Death

Snape kills Dumbledore knowing that it will result in his own death

In a previous post, I argued that Snape’s killing of Dumbledore reflected Snape’s growing faith in his own moral judgment, and that Snape not losing his way and continuing to protect as many possible in a hostile environment displayed true, hard-earned moral resolve.

Here I would like to take a moment to appreciate the magnitude of that decision, given that the hostile environment of which I spoke is increased exponentially because of his choice.

In HBP, Dumbledore says the following about Voldemort:

“Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises against them and strikes back! Voldemort is no different! Always he was on the lookout for the one who would challenge him.”

If Voldemort was wary of challenges in the first war, he is even more so in the second war, as he extends that paranoia to his inner circle. His own followers are among those he oppresses, especially after they’ve let him down so spectacularly during the 13 years he was trapped in his intolerable bodiless state. He subjects them to threats and torture and constant legilimency. He dispenses with masks and singles out his followers by name, forcing his followers to take accountability, and pressuring them to fall in line, deride one another, and compete for his ever-elusive approval and the wholly nonexistent material benefits of his favor.

All that to say, with a tyrant like Voldemort, one needs to be careful of doing too little OR doing too much for him. Up until now, Snape has only had to worry about falling into the first category. But now, by killing “the only one [Voldemort] ever feared”, Snape and Dumbledore understand that Snape would be painting an unavoidable target on his back.

Dumbledore does not bother trying to convince Snape that killing him would help his standing with Voldemort. Besides the fact that his other arguments appealing to Snape’s protective nature are much more persuasive, it would simply be incorrect to assume that murdering Dumbledore would cause Voldemort to “trust [Snape] completely” (I hate you movies sm for this line change), and they both know it. In the books, we see Portrait Dumbledore actually outright contradict this line of reasoning by warning Snape, even after he has been killed by the man, to take precautions as he carries out tasks for the Order, as he’s “counting on [Snape] to remain in Lord Voldemort’s good books as long as possible”. Snape and Dumbledore know that there is no such thing as Voldemort’s “complete trust”; they seem fully aware that Snape will have to continually prove himself to Voldemort to remain alive, and even that is only for “as long as possible”. Whether it’s because of his threat to Voldemort’s position or his treachery being discovered by magnified scrutiny, after he kills Dumbledore, he’s on borrowed time.

And yet Snape accepts the charge anyway. His concerns for himself do not center around his life, but his soul, and his desire to protect other lives and souls and his respect for Dumbledore weigh out over the increased difficulty of his path that, at this point, he knows ends in death.

(Dumbledore, of course, ensures this by secretly saddling Snape with the Elder Wand. Given Snape has agreed to commit an act that he knows places him in a race against the clock to complete as much as possible before his time is up, Dumbledore might have let him fully own the decision to possess the Elder wand… but Dumbledore’s tendency to bundle risk onto his most precariously positioned men and his tendency to undercut Order members’ agency with needless secrecy is a infuriating well-established pattern. But more on that in another post…)

I meant to say Snape + Grimmauld Place vs Snape + Spinner's End, but it could also be Black + GP vs Snape + SE, whatever. woops

oldstonefacevimes ha respondido a tu publicación: for your mini-essay prompts: Snape + Grimmauld…

Hi, sorry, It’s late and I’m not very articulate lol. Taking out of the way the sirius/gp vs severus/se parallels thing, how about severus’ relationship with spinner’s end? as a space, a state of mind, a prison, an externalization of snapiness, idk.

Oh!  Okay, now those I can do.

I think we can tackle both “Snape and Grimmauld Place v. Snape and Spinner’s End” and “Sirius Black and Grimmauld Place v. Snape and Spinner’s End” with the same line of thought.

As previously written about in these tags and in this post, Snape’s own psyche traps him in Spinner’s End.  He was trapped there as a child by the obvious circumstances of childhood, but when Hogwarts fails to be his saving grace he remains trapped there, and he chooses to keep his childhood home and to live there during school holidays not only as part of his utilitarian lack of self-care and as a sub-conscious form of self-punishment but as an indication of how trapped he feels in the patterns of his childhood.  With Grimmauld Place, though he is not physically trapped there, his roles as Order member and later as Order Secret-Keeper for the house (an unwanted role, one in which Moody forces him to relive the trauma of killing Dumbledore in order to enter the house and do his job) continue this cycle of entrapment, as they are part and parcel of Dumbledore’s role for him, a role he will never (in life) escape.

Sirius Black, like Snape, was trapped as a child in an unpleasant (and potentially abusive) home situation.  However, unlike Snape, Black finds salvation at Hogwarts in the form of friends and popularity, and he escapes the cycle of childhood trauma manifested by Grimmauld Place.  Unfortunately for Black, this escape is but temporary, and by the time both he and Snape end up in Grimmauld Place again they are both trapped by their lives and their roles in fighting Voldemort in the same childhood homes they had hoped to leave behind.  Snape, of course, taunts Black unceasingly for his “cowardice” in remaining safe in Grimmauld Place while the rest of the Order does their dangerous work, mostly because Snape is admittedly an asshole, but in this he almost has a point–Black’s decision to remain in Grimmauld Place is one which keeps him safe.  Snape’s decision to remain in Spinner’s End and in Grimmauld Place is one which places him in constant and immediate emotional and physical danger.

The difference between them is that, while both situations are manifested in a run-down and miserable childhood home, Black’s prison is a physical one–he would leave it behind in a moment if leaving wouldn’t put his life and his friends’ safety in immediate danger.  Snape’s prison is purely psychological–he can physically go anywhere he wants, but his memories and his mentality would never permit it.  When Sirius Black dies, though his death is tragic and meaningless and endlessly harmful to Harry Potter, he dies free, both physically and psychologically.  Snape never escapes the cycles of his childhood; he dies trapped in them, in the very place where Sirius Black tried to kill him when they were children.

I mean on the one hand the whole bit where Snape is enraged because he knows that somehow Harry helped Sirius escape is funny. On the other hand, it's actually pretty mean that Dumbledore is looking amused by his whole reaction and kinda mocks and gaslights Snape and is all 'but the door's been locked. think about what you're saying. it's impossible that they could've left...unless of course Harry and Hermione could somehow be in two places at once lololol.' Especially given that he knows why Snape is so upset and that it's not actually just a petty grudge or wanting to get Harry expelled.

Eileen Prince is very interesting to me, I wish we knew more about her and her relationship with Severus, but also her past. I would like to think they had a good relationship but realistically it was most likely strained because of the abuse she/both of them faced at home, she was probably for the most part emotionally absent. And maybe in a way there's a parallel between her and Severus. What if she resented her son because she couldn't help but see her abuser in him (and she hated herself for feeling this way)? The same way Severus would later feel about Harry? What if he inherited his mother's anger

There's this one thing about the whole argument of "Severus Snape isn't redeemed just because he wants to fuck Harry's mom" that grinds my gears. Like that's implying Snape left his memories for Harry because he wanted to be redeemable in the eyes of those who survive. Snape doesn't give a shit if people think he's a good person or not. He spent 7 whole books proving he gives 0 fucks about his reputation by being an asshole (and I love him for it, honestly).

There's a whole myriad of other reasons why Snape gave Harry his childhood memories, first and foremost probably being because Harry's a little dumb but he's not that dumb and if a Death Eater, one of Voldemort's closest followers, the murderer of Albus Dumbledore himself wrote Harry a note saying "kill urself lmao trust me it's the only way to get rid Voldie" do you think Harry would go "capital idea, let me throw myself off the Astronomy Tower just like you punted Dumbledore off it" No. One single memory of Dumbledore saying "I raised Harry as a pig for slaughter" isn't going to make Harry do shit; he needs to know that Snape was and still is working for the Light side by showing him why he's doing all of this.

And, also, I like to think that this is Snape's weird way of trying to comfort Harry, by showing him he's not alone, that Snape understands his feelings of being trapped, of being powerless, stripped of choices, of surviving a terrible childhood and instead of getting a reward, of building that found family, he's instead sentenced to die and it's not fair.

What do you think of the neo-nazi description for Snape? (To be honest I'm so tired of people ascribing values of real life events to a fictional text. There are simply not enough parallels to label someone a Nazi or terrorist, whatever Rowling may have intended.)

I agree with you; it makes me uneasy because I think the writing in Potter about this specific issue is not deft and nuanced enough for it to be analysed and critiqued rigorously.  Nazism, and similar right wing facist offshoots are very dangerous concepts and ideologies, and I think that using the term constantly can reduce its currency and impact.

This is why Godwin’s Law was important as a concept - as Godwin himself said, he was attempting to force people to scrutinise why they instantly leapt to comparing the person they were arguing with to Hitler.  Such a statement shouldn’t be an unthinking process - and the more you do it, the more ridiculous it sounds, and there’s an argument that in doing so, you inadvertently reduce the real life horrors that were endured during that time period; Hitler and Nazism almost becomes a joke, which is unconscionable and utterly disrespectful when you consider the incredible loss of life on both sides of the war.

I also fear that we also lose sight of genocide as a problem - that too many in the West are happy to think of genocide solely in terms of the Holocaust and WWII, without thinking of other countries, other conflicts and wars.  There appears to be an assumption that it no longer happens, and won’t ever happen again, which is naive at best and ignorant at worst.

In fairness, I do appreciate that JK had these broad ideas in mind when she was writing the series, but just because that’s what the writer had in mind, it doesn’t mean that we have to critique using the same lens.  It bothers me when I see the rise of far right politicians, and I think that we’re so used to hearing accusations about Nazis that people won’t take it seriously when they need to…  The boy who cried wolf, and all that.