Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The Harry Potter series has never shied away from the topic of death. However, in every novel in the series to date, death is seen as a fate that must be avoided at all costs. In The Deathly Hallows, Rowling changes the narrative around death and begins to explore the nobility of death, or more accurately, what it means to conquer one’s fear of death. Rowling uses the parallel journeys of Voldemort and Harry to illustrate the difference between running from the inevitability of death and accepting death with dignity and honor.

In the sixth Harry Potter novel, Rowling introduces the idea of Horcruxes, evil objects in which a person conceals a piece of their soul so they can return to the world of the living when they die. Voldemort calls his Horcruxes “his treasures, his safeguards, his anchors to immortality” (549), and he believes that he has conquered death in the process of making so many Horcruxes. However, as Dumbledore explains, the process of ripping his soul into so many pieces has “rendered [Voldemort’s] soul so unstable that it broke apart” (709), and Harry became “the Horcrux [Voldemort] never meant to make” (709).