How do you think Harry would have turned out if there had been no Voldemort to tear his life apart? if he had been raised by his parents rather than by the Dursleys?
I'm not sure he would have turned out all that well.
Harry spends a lot of time across the seven novels wondering about what his life would have been like if his parents had lived, if he had grown up in a happy home with his mother and father, without a scar, perhaps even with a brother or sister or two as part of his life.
On the other hand, Albus Dumbledore spends a lot of time throughout the seven books telling Harry that it is precisely the fact that he is who he is, that he has a great capacity for love and little or no inclination to focus on himself, to be selfish and self-centred, that makes him so uniquely qualified to overcome the challenges that he faces.
Even as early as book one, The Philosopher's Stone, Dumbledore gambles on Harry's innate goodness and selflessness in making sure that the Stone can be acquired from the Mirror only by one who wishes to possess it but not use it.
When Voldemort attempts to inhabit Harry's mind and body in book five, The Order of the Phoenix, it is Harry's great capacity to love that makes his possession intolerable to the Dark Lord.
And, as Dumbledore so carefully explains in King's Cross at the end of The Deathly Hallows, Harry's goodness makes him worthy of uniting the Hallows in a manner that Dumbledore himself failed.
My point is, Harry becomes this unusually selfless and caring person, this person with such an enormous capacity to love others and put their needs above his own, as a product of his childhood spent in the cold, harsh household of the Dursleys. Had he not gone through the trauma of that experience, would he really be the person so worthy of taking Voldemort down time and again?
I'm not so sure. After all, look at the people who would have been around to influence him in that alternative, early life. James Potter was no saint as a child and young man. In fact, we learn in Book Six that Harry's father was a somewhat foppish, arrogant bully while at Hogwarts and that his godfather, Sirius, was a vain, idle young man who looked upon the world with a boredom verging on complete dismissal of those around him, but for his chosen few.
Would Lily, Harry's mother, whose virtue is never really questioned, have been able to exert sufficient influence on Harry to stop him from becoming as aggressive and self-centred a young man as his father once was?
I doubt it.
So we end up with J.K.'s ultimate irony: Voldemort did more than mark Harry as his equal when he murdered James and Lily and left the lightning scar on baby Harry's forehead; the Dark Lord created the circumstances that would ensure Harry gained the very qualities (selflessness and a great capacity for love and self-sacrifice) that would make Harry worthy of overcoming the challenges that his difficult life would present him and ultimately defeating the Dark Lord.
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