Snape: A Definitive Reading

by Lorrie Kim

With confirmation that the messy intruder was Snape, this line is much funnier: “Evidently Sirius’s bedroom had been searched too, although its contents seemed to have been judged mostly, if not entirely, worthless.” (HP/DH, 179) Even in the passive voice, the sentence resounds with Snape’s disdain for everything to do with this room and its late owner. Rereading this sentence in light of Snape’s memory involves extraordinarily layered perspectives and time shifts. We readers are going back in our own time, looking at this sentence anew and remembering how we read it before. The narrator is showing Harry’s perspective as he reads the evidence of the room, recognizing that someone had been there before him, reconstructing the probable process of that person’s search and the probable conclusions they eventually reached, considering again how the room looks but from the point of view of the unknown intruder. This person had judged Sirius, and not favorably. Snape is not in the scene at all, yet we can imagine his presence vividly throughout.