Is Snape good or evil? Is he even really one character?

Is Snape good? Or is Snape evil?


According to a report on the CNN website, that argument has again erupted, this time in the Twittersphere and this time focusing on why Harry and Ginny would choose to name their son "Albus Severus", honouring both Harry's biggest mentor and guide in the wizarding world, a man who was almost without fail kind and fair with Harry, and the man who was, for most of the seven-book series, sadistically abusive of Harry and his friends.


Even our favourite author, J.K. Rowling, entered the heated fray.

After what sounds to have been a long and surprisingly vitriolic debate, Rowling tweeted: "There's a whole essay in why Harry gave his son Snape's name, but the decision goes to the heart of who Harry was, post-war."

And further: "In honouring Snape, Harry hoped in his heart that he too would be forgiven. The deaths at the Battle of Hogwarts would haunt Harry forever."

And finally: "Snape is all grey. You can't make him a saint: he was vindictive & bullying. You can't make him a devil: he died to save the wizarding world."

Now, you can go back through my earlier posts on this blog and find snippets here and there that might help you understand my own interpretation, my "take" on this debate and on Rowling's approach to it (and I would encourage you to do so -- I've had a lot of fun writing all these posts and I hope you will be willing to invest some time in reading them) but allow me to summarise my thoughts on the subject here.

First, I agree in some ways with Rowling: Snape is an amalgam of good and evil. Shaped by his early personal experiences, he is a proud, angry, vindictive man. We know that his father was abusive and his parents fought all through his childhood. We know that he was bullied by James and Sirius and their gang and we know that, in the midst of all that, he fell very deeply and irrevocably in love with Lily Evans, one of the few major characters in the books who is presented as being without fault.

But I also think it is important that, while Snape turns out to be fighting on the side of good, he was also a brutal, nasty, horrible person in situations where such egregious behavior was not at all necessary. Nothing required him to bully Neville throughout his years at Hogwarts; nothing required Snape to pick on Ron and Hermione either.

Even if we buy the argument that Snape's terrible relationship with James Potter in some way explained and excused his behaviour toward Harry, I doubt very much it can possibly excuse just how awful he was to our boy hero. Not even the argument that Snape needed to convince and re-convince Voldemort that he was not an agent for Dumbledore could explain away just how unnecessarily cruel Snape was to Harry and his friends.

Further, even if we accept that Snape is a good guy, he did help bring about the deaths of two other of the good guys: Emmeline Vance and Sirius Black.

How does that fact impact the argument with regard to Snape? As I have written before, at its heart, this is a moral question. Is it morally acceptable to sacrifice at least two lives in hopes of avoiding the deaths of many many more? And, if we can forgive Snape the deaths of Vance and Black simply because Snape turns out to be willing to sacrifice himself to help defeat Voldemort, can we forgive him his earlier behaviour toward these children, when he was in the role of teacher, for the same reason?

I think our analysis of Snape has to take into account the evolving complexity of the books, the characters and their situations, from The Philosopher's Stone (which is a children's book) to The Deathly Hallows (which is a fully adult novel).

In the early books, Snape was basically a cardboard figure who represented evil. He was only and utterly Harry's nemesis. Whether or not Rowling had fully fleshed out, when she wrote the first three books, the complex and contradictory role Snape would eventually play in the later novels, Snape is presented early on as a flat, mysterious, horrible character.

More importantly, he was the key to one of the earliest examples of one of Rowling's favourite narrative strategies: misdirection. In The Philosopher's Stone, for example, Snape had to be presented as irredeemably evil in order to draw the reader's attention away from Quirrell, one of the two true villains of that story.

I would argue that, as the novels progressed and increased in depth and complexity, Rowling added more depth and complexity to her characters. She added shades of grey, to use that now horrible expression, to what had been black and white, flat, stock characters.


You see this most specifically with regard to Snape and Dumbledore, though Dumbledore's shades are mostly added only after his death in The Half-Blood Prince.


If I had to state things bluntly, I would say that the Snape of the first four books (especially books one and two) is not the same character as the Snape of the last three (especially the final one). To hold the actions of the early Snape against the later Snape is almost unfair.


In the end, this is not a question of Snape's personality or moral goodness; this is a question of Rowling's narrative strategy.