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Comparing The Quest In Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone

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The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis and the first two Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling have a multitude of complex characters for and against the quest’s in their texts. Northrop Frye’s “The Mythos of Summer: Romance.” outlines how he believes what a character’s traits are based on their position on the quest. Frye claims that, “Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it they are caricatured as simply villainous or cowardly” (195). In Tolkien’s, Lewis’s and Rowling’s texts the characters for the quest are not pure. Each character from the quest has at least one fault that characterizes that character to be impure. While most of the impure actions happened for good reasons the characters has still become impure. Also, the characters that are against the quest are not as horrible as Frye would characterize the characters to be. Each character has their own reason to reject the quest but the …show more content…
Harry Potter himself is not pure. Since one of the genres in this text is a school story Harry does break many rule making him impure. One such rule that Harry broke caused him to be very disliked by his classmates and disguised by his professor. When Harry is caught out of bed with Hermione and Neville, Professor McGonagall remarked, “‘Now get back to bed, all of you. [I have] never been more ashamed of Gryffindor students’” (Rowling, Philosopher’s Stone 178). This is a very low moment for Harry in the text. While he broke the rule for to help Hagrid, he lost some of his purity. Students that were not in Slytherin started to think he was not as wonderful as his past made him out to be. Therefore, Rowling shows through the uses of school genre that characters for the quest do not need to be

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