Analyzing Harry Potter

I promise this is my last Harry Potter entry for a while.

There may be Book 7 spoilers in here, so if you haven't yet read Book 7 and don't want to know anything (though I can't imagine there are many people left on the internet who haven't stumbled over something about the book), you may want to move along.

Being a writer myself, I have been curious about the popularity of these books. So as I read I attempted to make a brief and unfocused study on the subject.

So here goes nothing.

This is a QUEST series. The entire thing is one long quest - to rid the world of Voldemort. Each book has a quest within, a smaller quest that helps the larger one.

There are also MYSTERIES in each book, with clues to unravel and points to ponder.

Rowling keeps to POINT OF VIEW. Her hero is Harry, and everything is revealed as Harry learns it. No omniscient narrator, no getting into Hermione's head. This is all about Harry.

While this may be a failing for someone who is happier with the other characters than with Harry, for this series, it works well, and Rowling is quite adept at it. Fantasy allows her to create methods like the Pensieve that allows her to be in the minds of others without leaving Harry's point of view. That is ingenious, I must say.

It does, however, give a one-sided notion of the other characters. Hermione, for example, comes across as rather one dimensional at times, not because the character truly is that way but because the reader only sees her through Harry's eyes and that is how *he* sees her. Harry worships Dumbledore, and thus the reader sees Dumbledore as Harry does. However, we learn later that Dumbledore is multi-faceted and not entirely blameless.

I think the POINT OF VIEW is very important. As a book reviewer, I can't tell you how many books I've written that were in first person, then suddenly in third, or in limited omniscient and suddenly . . . not. As a reader, I always find it very frustrating to "suddenly" have a point of view switch.

Next, this book is not original, not really. There are a great number of characteristics of The Lord of the Rings in this series. For example:

one focal character - Harry/Frodo (0r Aragorn, I could argue this both ways)
an entourage - Hermione and Ron/The Fellowship
a mentoring wizard with ulterior motives - Dumbledore/Gandolf
evil wizards - Voldemort/Sauron (sp)
getting rid of something bad - the ring/horcruxes
lack of attention to the feminine - both books
orphaned hero - Harry/Frodo (although Frodo's parentage is never really called into question, they're not central to the TLOTR; his lack of ties, however, is crucial to the ring quest, I think)

There are other things, I feel sure, if I wanted to sit down and take the books and compare them in greater depth.

Finally, there is the language, which is certainly different for TLOTR and Harry Potter. The Lord of the Rings is definitely a harder series of books. The language is more difficult in those books.

Harry Potter was written for readers with a sixth grade education. I think this matters in writing, too. If you write for an older group, you limit your audience to that group.

So, I have reached no real conclusions, but I have gotten all of that off my mind. How this will help me write my own book, I have no idea, but there it is.