A quick observation about The Chamber of the Secrets

Hello, friends! I’m onto The Chamber of Secrets in my latest reading of the Harry Potter series, and I’ve noticed something interesting in the first couple of chapters. Can’t remember whether this has occurred to me on previous readings, but I’d like to share it with you now.

When Dobby visits Harry in his room (Chapter Two “Dobby’s Warning”), it comes out that he’s been stopping Harry’s letters from his friends from Hogwarts over the summer. This occurs right around the time of Harry’s birthday. “Give me my friends’ letters!” he shouts at Dobby. This reminded me at once that in The Sorcerer’s Stone, letters to Harry are also being stopped, also right around his birthday, but in that case, by Uncle Vernon (Chapter Three “The Letters from No One”). “I WANT MY LETTER!” he shouts at him. I thought this was a nice parallel in the early episodes of the first two novels in the series.

And there’s another one. In the same chapter of The Chamber of Secrets, after Uncle Vernon has locked Harry up in his room with bars on the window, “[Harry] dreamed that he was on show in a zoo, with a card reading UNDERAGE WIZARD attached to his cage. People goggled through the bars as he lay, starving and weak, on a bed of straw” (p. 23). This reminded me of the episode with the boa constrictor in the zoo in The Sorcerer’s Stone, Chapter Two “The Vanishing Glass”, another nice parallel in the opening chapters of the two books. Even better, if we consider the parallel more carefully, Harry imagines himself more or less in the same place as a snake in his dream — something that will happen again, much more obviously and to much greater dramatic effect, later on in the series in The Order of the Phoenix. I think the parallel may be read as a very early and subtle reinforcement of the close connection between Harry and Voldemort, a connection that will be made clearer by the end of the second book and come into sharper and sharper relief as the series progresses.