Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire

The fourth installment of the Harry Potter series brings a shift in the tone of the beloved boy wizard’s adventures. In the first three novels, Harry went toe-to-toe with Dark wizards and ferocious beasts, but as expected, Harry always escaped relatively unscathed and lived to spend another year at Hogwarts. In The Goblet of Fire, however, Harry finds himself faced with the most horrifying scene he has witnessed thus far: the death of a fellow Hogwarts student, killed in cold blood by another person. Rowling uses Cedric’s death and the Unforgivable Curses to illustrate the death of innocence and the type of trauma that can permanently alter a child’s perception of the world around them.

When Professor Moody teaches the class about the Unforgivable Curses at the beginning of the year, he explains that the Ministry of Magic thinks it is inappropriate to show these spells to students during their fourth year. However, he stresses that the students need to know “what [they’re] up against” (87). Wildly different from the Defense Against the Dark Arts professors who have come before him, Moody teaches the students that the world is scary, chaotic, and evil instead of shying away from the horrors that await the fourth-year students. When Harry watches Moody cast the Avada Kedavra curse on the spider, he realizes with jarring clarity that he has just witnessed the curse that killed his parents. For years, this information was withheld from Harry, and now he is forced to grapple with it for the first time.

In the graveyard, Voldemort taunts Harry and tells his followers that he will “prove [his] power by killing [Harry], [...] in front of [them], when there is no Dumbledore to help him, and no mother to die for him” (266). Voldemort knows that Harry has been sheltered and protected by others his whole life, and in the graveyard, he has successfully isolated Harry from any protection that might have preserved his life. Harry is forced to face Voldemort alone, and instead of running and hiding like a child, he decides that is “not going to die crouching [t]here like a child playing hide-and-seek” (267). Still, even after escaping from Voldemort, Harry feels the weight of Cedric’s death pressing on him. He feels responsible because he urged Cedric to take the cup with him, and Harry cannot escape the feeling that it is his fault that the innocent Cedric Diggory has died. The graveyard is a traumatizing experience for Harry that will haunt him for years to come, and although Dumbledore praises him for his exceptional bravery, Harry feels like he failed to stop Voldemort from taking yet another innocent life. Harry’s childhood innocence has come to an end, and he now carries the burden of an adult wizard.