Blog Post #1: The Act of Expecting.

 “Expectations are scarcely ever fulfilled in truly literary texts”

                Integrating Wolfgang Iser’s opinion into the story that makes up Harry Potter, we can see this be true in several different aspects.  J K Rowling does this by bringing multiple genres together in order to complete the epic that is Harry Potter.  As we discussed in class she brings together these genres each already having an expected outcome.  By Rowling raising and limiting our expectations of characters throughout the novels, we start to go against the conventional outcomes, which will lead to some of them being unfulfilled to only build upon one another.

                In Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone, J K Rowling starts the series off by having the main character already being a hero by unintentionally stopping the villain.  Harry Potter, having no idea who he is, being the outcast of his “family”, is expected to do great things just because of his predisposition to fame and our knowledge of Voldemort.  Ron Weasley, the 6^th child of an all magic family, Hermione Granger the Muggle who surprisingly knows more about magic than both put together, team up with Harry, and together kept the Stone from Voldemort.  Throughout the entire book we were lead on to believe that Snape was the one plotting to steal the stone, when in the end it was someone different with different motives, and up until the end we were, for the most part, convinced Voldemort had been defeated.  Rowling does a great job at having half of our expectations filled.  Yes, ultimately they prevented the stone from being stolen, but we meet Voldemort briefly and he then disappears again, only to be found in a completely different way in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  Again in the Chamber of Secrets Harry defeats Voldemort/Tom Riddle, however I felt as though that was expected seeing as how in The Sorcerer’s Stone, we know that Voldemort is going to be the tell-tale villain.  What wasn’t expected is Ginny, having extraordinary older siblings, again having predetermined expectations being the one to open the Chamber and writing the messages.

J K Rowling doesn’t want certain expectations to be fulfilled along the way to keep the reader engaged, but if none were fulfilled at all, then people would just get tired and quite reading all together.  Instead, she creates small expectations that are brought up and fulfilled with each novel, while still building upon them to fulfill bigger expectations.