Chapter 16: Through the Trap Door

In the penultimate chapter of The Sorcerer’s Stone, the kids finish their exams and have no time to rest before they realize that the Sorcerer’s Stone’s defenses are about to be breached. They try to contact Dumbledore, but are intercepted by Professor McGonagall, whose child management skills fail once again. Convinced that he’s going to die soon regardless, Harry determines to protect the Stone himself, and Ron and Hermione join him. The three of them make it through a series of challenges, like a wizarding Ninja Warrior, and the chapter ends with Harry facing the final challenge alone.

This all could have easily been avoided. When the kids tell McGonagall that they know about the Sorcerer’s Stone—which no one outside of Hogwarts faculty should know, and especially not a bunch of first-year students—she might have decided to sit them all down for a long chat. Then, she would have learned what information has gotten out and been able to act accordingly, as well as reassuring the kids that someone is taking the situation seriously.

Instead, she scolds them and tells them all to go outside and play, and she threatens to take away more House points—a tactic which has clearly failed already. It’s a disappointing response from someone who is otherwise portrayed as a good teacher.

Still, I have to admit that the obstacle course conceit is fun. It starts out with an obvious mythical conceit, with the kids playing music to get past Fluffy/Cerberus. They don’t need Orpheus’s skill¹ to do it; Harry just plays one long drone note and Fluffy drops. But the reference makes it clear that this is a katabasis, a journey to the Underworld; Hermione takes time to mention that they “must be miles under the school.”

That statement is logically impossible, since they just jumped through a trapdoor on the third floor and landed without any injuries. This is only one of several impossibilities, with the most glaring being the fact that three first-year students are able to get through a series of challenges meant to protect against powerful adults. That kind of dubious logic has been evident since the very beginning of the book, where a group of sensible adults make the decision to leave a baby on a doorstep in the middle of the night.

I’ve noticed that a lot of readers, especially adults, get tripped up by the logic of Harry Potter, but it makes more sense if you approach it like a myth or a fairy tale. This is illustrated by Tokien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories”:

In speaking of that rather odd but widespread fairy-story The Frog-King Max Müller asked in his prim way: ‘How came such a story ever to be invented? Human beings were, we may hope, at all times sufficiently enlightened to know that a marriage between a frog and the daughter of a queen was absurd.’ Indeed we may hope so! For if not, there would be no point in this story at all, depending as it does essentially on the sense of the absurdity.²

I’ve seen a lot of adult readers react to Harry Potter like Max Müller in this quote, balking at the fairy-tale logic of Harry Potter. For example, Vanessa Zoltan in Harry Potter and the Sacred Text³ expresses frustration at Dumbledore’s decision to leave baby Harry on a doorstep in the first chapter. Meanwhile, the hosts of The Gayly Prophet regularly joked about the absurdity in Harry Potter, and in response to this chapter,⁴ they offered an equally absurd interpretation in order to make the story logical: the kids can get through adult enchantments because Dumbledore removed all of the teachers’ enchantments and replaced them with child-friendly versions specifically to manipulate and test the kids. There’s no indication of this in the actual book.

Trying to literalize the story is understandable, for reasons I’ll get into later, but if you recognize that the story takes place in an absurd fairy-tale world, you can see that it’s internally consistent. Everyone knows that you can’t leave a baby out in the cold in the middle of the night, just like we know that a girl can’t marry a frog, but it serves a purpose in the story. So it is in Harry Potter: being left on a doorstep is a common mythical or fairy tale trope of the “extraordinary birth” variety. This happening in the very first chapter introduces the reader to the world that the story takes place in: not exactly the wizarding world, but a story world which functions like a fairy-tale. Whether Harry is surrounded by Muggles or witches, he inhabits a world in which strange and absurd events are the norm.

Trying to read a nonliteral story in a literal way carries the risk of missing what really matters in the story. In Tolkien’s essay, he went on to say that the point of “The Frog-King” is “the necessity of keeping promises (even those with intolerable consequences).” While I don’t think that there’s such a clear moral in Harry Potter, we can still take a look at what the story is communicating.

The Harry Potter katabasis takes the form of an end-of-year test. It contrasts with their more absurd academic exams, one of which requires them to make a pineapple tap dance. The katabasis has them facing real consequences: Harry is convinced that Voldemort will come to kill him if they don’t act, and the challenges they face are dangerous. The priorities of the school are ridiculous in contrast.

The various obstacles are tailor-made to fit the three kids. Harry’s challenge relies on Quidditch, which he’s been practicing all year; Ron plays a chess game, which he’s excelled at throughout the book; and Hermione has a test of her intelligence, her strongest attribute. They also have to get through a literally strangling vine, the devil’s snare, which requires the three of them to work together, and they simply walk past an already unconscious troll, recalling their successes earlier in the book. They each get a chance to exercise their individual talents and to overcome these challenges as a group.

All of this demonstrates to the reader that the kids are capable of great achievements both as individuals and as a collective, and all in the face of opposition from adults both well-meaning and hostile. That, I think, is what it comes down to: this whole chapter is an act of rebellion against the absurd priorities of the people in power. Against all odds, the kids are successful. It’s an anti-authoritarian message that the small and vulnerable can use their individual strengths to work collectively to overcome challenges that seem impossible.

But I said earlier that literalizing the story is understandable, and it is. This is because ultimately, Harry Potter is not a myth or a fairy tale; it’s a novel. Novels can be as fantastical or as symbolic as they like, but a novel-reader expects some psychological realism in its characters. A fairy-tale reader probably won’t ask what happened in a witch’s childhood to lead her to antagonize children, but a novel-reader might.⁵

When the adults in a novel repeatedly fail the children they’re responsible for, it raises questions that need resolution. When an alcoholic makes children responsible for his mistakes, or when a teacher worsens bullying, what do we do with that? In this and in the later books, Hagrid is meant to be loveable and McGonagall is meant to be trustworthy—and maybe they are, but they’ve also made painful mistakes. Holding that emotional nuance is difficult for an adult, and these books are meant to be for children. There’s a cognitive dissonance raised that the books never even attempt to confront, so the reader is left floundering.

It’s not surprising, then, that adult readers ridicule or outright reject the fairy-tale themes and absurdities. There’s a feeling that something is off in the books, and it can be hard to pinpoint, especially when the failures of characters like Hagrid and McGonagall are so common in the real world. When the book fails to resolve or even acknowledge that tension, it’s hard for a reader to spot its source and easier to reject the obviously unreal parts of the book. The worldbuilding falls apart because it fails emotionally, not logically.

Returning to Tolkein’s essay, he talks about the emotions in fairy tales and responds to the stereotypical question children ask about the stories they’re told:

The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’ The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): ‘If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.’

For me, at least, the emotional failings in Harry Potter have meant so far that it can’t be a consolation or a satisfaction. It’s not “true” because the book can’t communicate what it fails to notice. The reading experience is frustrating, sometimes depressing, but never in a way that enlightens.

1. Fun fact: The Orpheus story type is at least 15,000 years old, dating back to the Ice Age if not earlier.

2. “On Fairy-Stories,” by J.R.R. Tolkien.

3. The website seems to be down, but you can find the episode here: Harry Potter and the Sacred Text Episode “Frustration: The Boy Who Lived”

4. Hashtag Ruthless: The Gayly Prophet Episode “Death By Falling”

5. A novel-writer might delve into the question deeply enough to come up with a book series on the subject which might inspire a well-loved Broadway musical.