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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the happiest book of the seven-book series. Many readers cite it as their favorite. For one thing, there’s no Voldemort. For another, almost everyone gets something they want. Harry gets a godfather. Sirius gets his freedom. Lupin gets a friend back. Hermione gets extra time. Wormtail escapes with his life. So does Buckbeak. The students get a good Defense teacher. Ron gets a wand and a sandwich from his mother that isn’t corned beef.
The “Prisoner of Azkaban” of the title is Sirius Black, the first wizard ever to break out from Azkaban, the wizard prison. He
That is actually incorrect. The first wizard to break out of Azkaban is Barty Crouch jr.
Are vulture hats more common than we realize in magical millinery? Or is this just how it feels when it seems like the whole world is laughing at you, from your boss to the Christmas crackers, and nobody seems to find anything wrong with this?
“Don’t expect me to cover up for you again, Harry. I cannot make you take Sirius Black seriously. But I would have thought that what you have heard when the dementors draw near you would have had more of an effect on you. Your parents gave their lives to keep you alive, Harry. A poor way to repay them—gambling their sacrifice for a bag of magic tricks.”
He may be a git, but the moments Snape allows himself to be seen are always a thrill.
“You fool,” said Lupin softly. “Is a schoolboy grudge worth putting an innocent man back inside Azkaban?”
After all the precautions put in place for Lupin’s protection as a student, after all the special treatment, Lupin still led his friends into danger, out-of-bounds, at night, and visited Hogsmeade as a werewolf. Yet when Sirius nearly got him to kill another student, nobody was expelled; there is no evidence that anyone was even punished. The only consequence we know for sure is that Snape was “forbidden by Dumbledore to tell anybody” (HP/PoA, 357) that Lupin is a werewolf. He was forbidden to speak of his terrifying experience. His near murder, and his need to work through it by talking, were
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Harry gets a glimpse of how his nemesis behaves when he thinks nobody’s looking. Snape is not acting here. He is careful even with the unconscious Sirius Black, in contrast to Sirius bumping Snape’s head intentionally when Snape was unconscious. (HP/PoA, 378) It may be that the private Snape is a better man than the public persona Harry usually sees.
While Lupin was still in werewolf form, Sirius made the solo decision to tell Dumbledore the secrets Lupin has been keeping since his school days. By the time the moon set and Lupin reverted to human form, Dumbledore had time to realize that Lupin had roamed Hogwarts and Hogsmeade in werewolf form as a student, lied about this to Dumbledore, withheld information about Sirius when Lupin returned to teach, and finally, roamed the grounds again in werewolf form as a teacher. It would not have been fun to be Lupin during that morning’s job performance review with his employer. We can see that
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Snape has no romance in his life and never will, for three reasons. On his first chance, he destroyed his own prospects and faith in himself when he repelled the love of his life with his hateful politics, which eventually brought about her death. On his second chance, he will atone for this with undercover work that makes romance too risky. Thirdly, he would have had a difficult time attracting romance in any case because life is painfully—agonizingly—unfair to the homely.
Snape is certainly taking out his stress on Harry. But he is also defying Umbridge’s order to remove the Strengthening Solution from the syllabus. Anything this Ministry might deem a threat is something the Boy Who Lived needs to know. This is a textbook example of Rowling loading Snape’s actions with exactly equal motives of protectiveness, sound strategy, and hostility toward Harry.
