There’s a critical tool that I think is extremely helpful when it comes to analysing the key features of the climax of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s a well-known theory about story structure that you may already be aware of. In 1949, Joseph Campbell was the first person to state an idea that we now take for granted: the notion that a great many stories conform to a similar underlying pattern. Since then, the theory has been revisited many times by many different authors, but all propose a similar story pattern – it has come to be known as ‘the hero’s journey’. The clearest description of this pattern is probably by Christopher Vogler in his book from 2007, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. This is the outline he describes.
1. The hero is called to adventure.
2. The hero leaves their ordinary world for an extraordinary domain.
3. The hero undergoes various tests.
4. The hero experiences a crisis – their greatest and most transformative ordeal.
5. At the climax of the story, the hero undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth.
6. The hero returns to their ordinary world to share the benefits of their adventure.
Vogler goes into some detail when discussing the ‘crisis’ or major ordeal that heroes undergo during their journey. He talks in terms of a ‘cave’ (symbolic or literal) that the hero approaches and enters. Below, I’ve listed some of the key features of the cave and the ordeal, as described by Vogler.
• The cave is located at the very heart of the extraordinary world.
• The cave will be heavily defended.
• The hero may be warned not to enter.
• The audience must be reminded that the stakes are high.
• The hero may pause at the threshold of the cave, for example to summon courage, plan or engage in reconnaissance.
• Before the cave can be entered, a series of tests must be passed.
• If there is a team of protagonists trying to get to the cave, they may regroup and recommit.
• There will be a point beyond which only the one true hero can go – the team must be left behind.
• The ordeal in the cave is the greatest source of terror and wonder the hero could experience. It will usually involve coming face to face with an archenemy.
• In the encounter, the hero will be acting out their inner struggle – the archenemy represents the shadow side of their character.
• The hero appears to die but is reborn.
It strikes me that these observations correspond very closely to the key characteristics of the climactic sequence in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which are described in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen. I’ll take Vogler’s observations in order and identify the equivalent moments in the novel.
• The events of Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen take place in a location deep below Hogwarts – the main stage of the novel’s action.
• The location is concealed, forbidden and can only be accessed via a single trapdoor, which is guarded by a vicious monster.
• When Harry and his inner circle are making for the trapdoor, Neville intercepts them from losing more house points.
• As Harry is trying to reason with Neville, he can’t forget the seriousness of the situation – he has one eye on the time: ‘Harry looked at the grandfather clock by the door. They couldn’t afford to waste any more time, Snape might even now be playing Fluffy to sleep.’
• At the trapdoor itself, Harry and the others have an anxious moment: ‘Seeing the open door somehow seemed to impress upon all three of them what was facing them.’
• On the other side of the trapdoor, there is a sequence of tests waiting for them. A vicious plant, elusive flying keys, a violent chess game and a riddle.
• While dealing with the tests, there are moments of disagreement: ‘”Do you want to stop Snape or not?”’ says Ron when he’s challenged on his chess tactics.
• The final test involves bottles of liquid – only one of them will get you through a black fire that protects the chamber where the Philosopher’s Stone is thought to be. Harry has to drink that.
• The highpoint of the novel’s climatic sequence is the face-to-face encounter between Harry and Voldemort. This evil wizard has been a dark presence in Harry’s life, having murdered his parents. Within the wider world of the novel, even Voldemort’s name is enough to strike terror into people’s hearts. The scar on Harry’s forehead is a sign of the threat from Voldemort. But it is also a reminder of a deep mystery – Voldemort was badly damaged when he last tried to kill Harry.
• In the Sorting Hat episode, earlier in the novel, it became clear that Harry had the potential to follow an evil path as a hanger-on of Voldemort. This is the inner struggle that the conflict in Chapter Seventeen acts out. In fact, J.K. Rowling includes a metaphor that perfectly describes a human soul that has lost the battle with its shadow side: Quirrell hosting Voldemort on the back of his head.
• Harry falls unconscious during the struggle with Quirrell/Voldemort but comes round and finds himself safe with Dumbledore.
Of course, we can’t separate the climactic sequence of the novel from the story that precedes it. If we consider the main body of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it too has many points of correspondence with the journey described by Vogler and others: Harry is called out of his ordinary life with the Dursleys into the extraordinary world of Hogwarts, where he undergoes the various challenges associated with the Bildungsroman, Fantasy and Mystery plots.
However, I think it’s unwise to treat ‘the hero’s journey’ as a key that unlocks every aspect of a story. It can blind you to the many other ways of analysing a text and cause you gloss over the unique aspects of an author’s achievement. There is also a tendency I’ve observed (and occasionally fallen victim to) for literary critics to twist and distort stories in order to make them fit Vogler’s pattern. You only have to ask yourself, what is the climax stage of ‘the hero’s journey’ in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone if the confrontation with Voldemort is to be considered the crisis stage. The novel is over and done within a few pages of the showdown. Maybe you could argue that the events in the forbidden forest are the true crisis stage, which would make the clash with Voldemort the climax stage. But that doesn’t really stand up to a close comparison of Vogler’s descriptions and the detail of the novel, and, in any case, that way madness lies!
That said, I do think this influential theory helps us to see what makes the climactic sequence of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone so effective. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that J.K. Rowling has read the Vogler book, or something like it. It’s certainly no surprise to me that most of the subsequent Harry Potter books have a similar final encounter with evil.