Order of the Phoenix Analysis

    
Sorry this is a week late. It is a long book so it yielded a rather long analysis. Well without further ado:

Harry’s Depression and Anger

Harry’s fifth year is a difficult one to say the least. He has to deal with feelings of abandonment, especially from Dumbledore, and with being an outcast who is publicly doubted by the press and government; something that for anyone would be hard, but is even harder for a teenager who is struggling with other issues. His home, Hogwarts, is also being destroyed in front of him. Hogwarts is the place where he feels safe and happy, but now all of that is being taken away. He is being abandoned by people he considers friends, e.g. Seamus, and many of the other students at the school think he is a liar or mentally unbalanced. He is not able to talk to the people outside of Hogwarts that mean most to him; namely Sirius. Finally, if you consider all of this, it is no surprise that throughout the year Harry shows signs of depression and struggles with his anger. Teenagers at that age already struggle with self image and moodiness, even without the majority of a country judging your sanity and waiting for you to make a mistake.

New Characters: Luna and Tonks

Luna is a very ethereal character. She lives in her own world filled with nargles and crumple-horned snorkacks. Hermione tells Harry that she only believes in things that have no proof at all. She is above the taunting and harassment of her fellow students. She appears to show no emotion to any of their taunts or pranks. In a way, she posses the qualities that Harry lacks. She is confident in herself, she has faith in things like life after death, and she is willing to do anything for her friends.

Tonks on the other hand, is very similar to Harry. She is an Auror (Harry’s dream job) and she is young. She is a Metamorphagus, meaning that she can change her appearance at will. Tonks is outgoing and is always offering a warm and excited welcome. She is also the protege of Moody, which means that she can pack a punch when she needs to. She is a newer member of the Order, but a very good addition.

Order of the Phoenix

In the fifth book, the Order is the only force combating Voldemort and the Death Eaters. It is a secret society established by Dumbledore during the first war, and the one that Harry’s parents worked for before their deaths. They are composed of several different types of people, though they mainly are Aurors or people with qualities that allow them to access secluded parts of society. During this book, their main objectives were to convince people that Voldemort had indeed returned, and to guard the Department of Mysteries to prevent the Death Eaters from accessing it. 

Corruption in the Press and Government
JKR has said that one of the themes that she wanted to incorporate into her books was that you shouldn’t always trust the government and the press, because all to often they lie and have agendas. Well I would say that she definitely got that theme into the fifth book. We see how both the ministry and the Prophet are able to lie to the public, as well as how the slander against Harry affects him and his relationships. Fudge was interested in remaining in power more than protecting his people. He was either in denial of the truth, or worse, he knew that Voldemort was back and decided to do nothing and deny it. In Order of the Phoenix, we also see how the Ministry in able to affect the press and pressure them to print what they want. That isn’t the only thing that motivated the Prophet to print lies though, another factor was money. When Harry gave his interview, Rita Skeeter talked about why the Prophet wouldn’t print his story: because when they print things about him being crazy, they sell more papers. The public doesn’t want to hear the truth when the lie is so much more entertaining.

The Giant Plot Line

This is one of those plot lines that I think JKR planned on doing more with but didn’t have the space in the series to devote to it. We do see them appear at the final battle and Grawp does make a few more appearances in the last few books, but overall JKR spends a lot of the fifth book on giants, but they don’t appear much after that. Maybe that will be one of the revelations in Pottermore (cross your fingers). She has admitted to other plot lines that have been dropped: Dean’s background, Florean Fortesque’s disappearance, etc. But the sheer amount that giants appear in this book but don’t seem to be used later on, force me to conclude that JKR had other plans for them that we never got to see.

Umbridge

Umbridge may be one of the best written villains in any book I have ever read, and I have read quite a few books in my life. Few characters have ever felt quite as evil and twisted as Umbridge. I think that this may be one of JKR’s best characters; because she serves her function perfectly and she instills an uneasiness within the reader, as well as the characters. Umbridge is a complex villain, she is evil by nature, but as we will see later, she doesn’t really care who she serves. She will support whoever will give her the most power and is at the time the most powerful. She takes great joy in the suffering of others, like all great villains should. She is also complex because she has this very disturbing facade. She wears pink cardigans and covers the walls of her office in plates decorated with kittens, and basically she has the taste of an old person, but on the inside she is evil. Her soft and inviting outside is only a ruse; she is truly a psychopath. We get even more support for this by the fact that she is able to gain the trust of the people she wants to: Percy says that she is a lovely woman, and obviously the minister trusts her. Overall, Umbridge is a terrifying character, and in many ways scares me more than Voldemort throughout the books. Harry has a lot of direct contact with her and we see more of her evil directly than we did of Voldemort. Umbridge is truly fascinating.

Dumbledore’s Army

The DA is, in a way, Harry’s version of the Order. Hermione proposes it to allow students the opportunity to learn how to fight, since Umbridge was not teaching them. Harry became the leader and teacher of the DA. The DA became a band of resistance to Umbridge, and a group that Harry could call upon for help. The DA also served as a kind of beacon of hope to Harry. As everything Harry loved was taken away, he began to long for the time he spent with the DA. He was really proud of the progress they were making, and in the end, it was his instruction that gave his friends the skills they needed to fight at the Ministry. 

Department of Mysteries

The Department of Mysteries is one of the things I find most interesting in the books. The rooms are filled with interesting topics that are studied by the ‘Unspeakables’. It is a top secret department of the Ministry, and for good measure. Each of the rooms we see in the DoM seems to focus on a theme: the brain room (knowledge), the room with the clocks and bell jar (time), the Hall of Prophecies (the future), the room with the veil (death), and the room with love that Dumbledore told Harry about. It seems that this is where the wizarding world researches life’s most basic, yet complicated, questions.

The veil, like the Mirror of Erised, is one of JKR’s most interesting objects. It is literally the divide between life and death. It is a one-way passage- in other words, you can’t come back. There is also a bit of a mystery around who can here voices from the other side. Luna, Harry, and Ginny were all able to here some sort of sound coming from the veil; but Hermione, Ron, and Neville didn’t seem to be able to. JKR explained it like this in an interview in 2008: that being able to hear the voices is determined by the level of belief you have in an afterlife. Luna would hear them the most because she is definite in her belief that there is something beyond death. Harry has had to live with death for so long that it is part of his life in a very real way. JKR also says that she believes that women would be able to hear the voices more frequently than men, thus Ginny. I find the veil fascinating, it is a very complex object, yet in some ways very simple.

The Loss of Sirius

As Dumbledore said: Harry had begun to think of Sirius as a “mixture of father and brother.” Sirius was the closest thing that Harry had to a parent, so when Sirius dies, we see a reaction that is equal to his love for Sirius. Harry always has a hard time controlling his emotions, and this is no different. He is smashing all of Dumbledore’s possessions. We see him go through grief. I think that JKR was perhaps putting a bit of her own life experiences into this part. As many readers know, JKR lost her mom as she began writing the first book. I think that JKR is very familiar with grief, and wanted to show what it was like here. I have to say, she did a pretty good job. Harry feels lost and doesn’t want to talk about it, then he does. He doesn’t want to be around people, but when alone, he does. He is truly grief stricken by Sirius’ death.

The Prophecy

Then on the heels of Sirius’ death, we have the revelation of what the Prophecy entails. Harry, someone whose life has been filled with death up to this point, is going to have to either kill or be killed. The entire wizarding world rests on some battle between himself and Voldemort. For a fifteen year old who should be more concerned with quidditch matches and girls, this is a lot to bear. Finding out about the Prophecy not only reveals a bit of his future, but also his past. He discovers that the reason that Voldemort killed his parents was because he was trying to kill Harry. So, needless to say, the end of term was a very hard time for Harry all around.

Questions

How could Fred and George Apparate with the extendable ears in Grimmauld Place after Harry arrived? Did they apparate with them? In fact, why didn’t headquarters have the protections preventing people from Apparating within its boundaries?
What did Moody see when he checked if it was a boggart in the writing desk?
Does Fudge believe that Voldemort is back and is just lying, or does he actually believe that Voldemort hasn’t returned?
What do portraits see when they look into other portraits beside them? Is there some three dimensional world back there?
Where did Sirius get a wand? Wouldn’t they have destroyed his after he was sent to Azkaban?
Is McGonagall Scottish? She has a lot of tartan things.
Couldn’t Dumbledore have found a way to explain to Harry why they couldn’t have a lot of contact rather than ignoring him?
What venom was in Nagini’s fangs? Isn’t she a constrictor ? If so, did Voldemort use magic to give her venom?