Massive Spoiler Alert! Do NOT read this post if you haven't read the Harry Potter books, unless you want to know a bunch of significant plot points ahead of time! You've been warned.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CommanderROR
I remember reading HP 6 and thinking when Dumbledore died: "He's not dead, no way!" But I'd actually like to be wrong...many fantasy books follow the "Tolkien Plan" (or something similar) too closely.
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I really do think he's really most sincerely dead. It'd be too much to be believable for him to come back.
Drinking all that potion (which you
know can't have been good for him), hit with the
Avada Cadavra, falling from the
highest, mind you, tower in the castle, and definitely hitting the ground.
All of that, in front of the entire school for witnesses. Then several days later Hagrid carries his body (the body itself,
not a casket) out, again in front of a huge crowd of witnesses, and it's magically encased in the tomb.
I could buy that his body might not actually be
in the tomb, but that's just too large a witness load to accept that somehow the were
all fooled -- just too much disbelief to suspend.
About the
only thing she could pull, and I still think this is way too thin, is to have given him some sort of phoenix related charm/ability/whatever, so that he's really dead, but comes back from being
actually dead, rather than
presumed dead. We do have his phoenix Fawkes as a possible 'hint' of that sort of thing, but I really don't think so.
In the Tolkien model, the 'dead' wizard is
presumed dead, people see him fall, blow up, get carried off, sink into the sea, etc. They don't see his dead corpse, or see it buried, that's more of a New Testament model, and Rowling hasn't made any real Biblical allusions that I've noticed ... with the possible exception of the term "hoarcrux."
But I think the biggest evidence that Dumbledore is really dead is that Snape is still
alive -- the "Unbreakable Vow" that Snape took at the beginning of HP6, was basically to kill Dumbledore if Malfoy didn't, and we know that the Unbreakable Vow kills you if you try to break it, so if Snape hadn't killed Dumbledore,
Snape wouldn't still be alive. I don't really think he hated Dumbledore enough for the
Avada Cadavra to have killed him by itself, but the curse threw him off the tower, so there you go.
Then too, I think I remember reading somewhere that Rowling had said that he really was dead.