Harry Potter mania began long ago–or, rather, never stopped–and while I am not personally a Potter fanatic, I am married to one and work with several others, so it’s impossible not to be caught up in the predictions, analyses, and anxieties swirling in the Pottersphere in anticipation of July 21 release of the final book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”
Of course, most of the chatter revolves around this key question: Will our hero survive the series that bears his name? Most Potter fans are, naturally, rooting for Harry to prevail, alive, and are devastated–pre-emptively–at the thought that he might die. At least one brave soul, however, has spoken out in support of young Harry’s death: Father Joanathan Tobias, an Orthodox priest, writes that Harry must die. From the Beliefnet article about this lonely stance:

“There is little decent tragedy around” in modern culture, said Tobias, at his “Second Terrace” weblog. “There is a lot of irony, where a non-heroic central character is pitched into the abyss of ambiguity. There is a lot of farce, where burlesque mummers traipse around in varying degrees of moral undress.
“But tragedy? No…. We do not see the sense of the pollution of evil, and its uncleanness. We have no immediate feeling of the necessity to fix or to cleanse. And we haven’t seen much of a fable where the story demanded, clearly, the surmounting and cleansing of evil–even at the cost of real, hard sacrifice.”
… “Part of being a hero is to have a great love and to be willing to make a great sacrifice for that love,” [Tobias] said. “It seems to me that Harry Potter has been walking down that same road. … It’s just hard to see him going home and settling down. He’s been through too much.”

(Read the whole article here.)
What do you think? Will J.K. Rowling kill off her own creation? Should Harry Potter die?
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