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Harry Potter Book Analysis 1
Book Report on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by Velvet Vienna
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (HPPS) is the first book of the Harry Potter series written by JK Rowling. The book starts off with an introduction to Mr and Mrs Dursley, Harry’s uncle and aunt, as well as Harry’s baby cousin Dudley, who live on Privet Drive. The Dursleys are ordinary people who prefer their lives to be ordinary and the same as everyone else’s. On one fine ordinary day, Mr Vernon Dursley, as usual, went to work. On the way in, he sees weird groups of people dressed in cloaks, going about excitedly, as if in celebration. He happens to overhear their whispering and catches them mentioning something about “The Potters and their son Harry”. He begins to get fearful, and rushes up to his office to call Mrs Petunia Dursley at home. He then changes his mind not to, and we find out that Mrs Dursley tend to get very upset at the mere mention of her younger sister, Mrs Potter.
Later that night, a man dressed in a cloak appears at Privet Drive, and a cat which had been sitting on the brick wall outside the Dursley’s transforms into a woman and goes up to meet him. The two talk, and we find out that the man is Albus Dumbledore, and the woman, Professor McGonagall. As they further discuss the day’s events, we also read to find that Voldemort had killed Harry’s parents, but failed to kill baby Harry. Dumbledore sends Hagrid (who is this very large-looking man) to pick Harry up, and Dumbledore decides to leave Harry at the Dursley’s doorsteps with a letter “to explain everything”.
Ten years on, Harry is still living with his aunt and uncle. His aunt and uncle have told him that his parents had died in a car crash, and he believes them. The Dursleys do not treat Harry like their own son, in fact, they treat him a bit more than trash. Strange things happen to Harry, like the snake which talked to him during the visit to the zoo on Dudley’s birthday (where it also, as Dudley claims “attacked him”) and his hair growing back by the next day when Aunt Petunia cut his hair so short he was bald except for his fringe. None of these things he could explain, and he always got punishment for them.
One summer day, before Harry and Dudley were supposed to enter their secondary schools, Harry receives a very mysterious letter. But before Harry can read it, Uncle Vernon grabs it from him, and upon reading it, panics. He and Aunt Petunia decide to ignore the letter, but the letters keep coming as the days go by, and the amount becomes more and more, until it filled the house. In the end, Uncle Vernon decides to bring the family to a deserted hut on an island in the middle of nowhere in the hopes of shaking off the letters. However, at midnight, Hagrid turns up at the hut, to deliver the very same letter to Harry, and is shocked to hear that the Dursleys did not tell Harry that his parents were wizards and witches. Harry then finds out that he is waiting to be enrolled in the finest school of witchcraft and wizardry, Hogwarts. Hagrid finally tells Harry about his past, that his parents were killed by the most powerful and darkest wizard Voldemort, and that his powers had failed to kill Harry, instead leaving him with only a lightning bolt scar while Voldemort vanished from the wizarding world. The Dursleys forbid Harry to go to Hogwarts to study magic, but Hagrid uses his magic to give Dudley a pig’s tail and they relent.
The next day Harry follows Hagrid to Diagon’s Alley in London to buy his school things. There Harry is shocked to find out that he is famous in the wizarding world, as almost everyone he meets wants to shake his hand. He and Hagrid go to the Wizard’s bank, Gringotts, where Harry finds his parents had left him quite a bit of money before they died. Harry buys his robes, schoolbooks, a set of scales and a cauldron, before he buys his wand from Ollivanders. There, Harry tries on many different types of wands before he finds a wand which suits him. The wandmaker then tells him that his wand is the only wand which shares the same core as the wand of Voldemort. After buying the wand, Hagrid buys Harry a birthday present; a snowy white owl which helps him send and receive his post in the wizarding world. Harry then goes back home to the Dursleys to wait for the first of September when he will take the train to Hogwarts.
On the first, the Dursleys send Harry to the train station, where Harry finds that there is no such platform as platform 9 and 3/4, which is the platform where he takes the Hogwarts train, the Hogwarts express. Feeling lost as the Dursleys had left him, laughing at the possibility of such a platform, Harry panics, until he overhears a mother and her children talking about the platform. With their help, he finds that he must run towards the barrier separating Platform 9 and 10 in order to get to his platform. Harry thanks them, and boards his train. Later, the youngest son of the mother joins him in the compartment, and introduces himself as Ron Weasley. The two hit it off very well, as Harry finds out that Ron is from an almost pure wizarding family, and he updates Harry on a lot of wizarding things that Harry never knew about. On the train ride, Harry bumps into a boy by the name of Draco Malfoy, whom he had seen in the robe shop. He becomes instant enemies with Draco, who Ron says is from one of the most darkest wizarding families around.
Upon reaching Hogwarts, Harry and the rest of the first years at Hogwarts are placed through the sorting hat ceremony, where a talking hat decides which house the first years should go to. Harry, Ron and Hermione (a bossy girl they met on the train) all enter Gryffindor, which is reputed to be one of the best houses in Hogwarts. Draco and his friends end up in Slytherin, which is the house where most of the dark wizards end up in.
As Harry begins to settle into classes at Hogwarts, he learns that the Potions teacher (and head of Slytherin house), Professor Snape, seems to hold a very strong dislike against him. According to rumours, Professor Snape is after the Defence against the Dark Arts position held by newbie Professor Quirrel because he knows a lot about the dark arts, and he has a very bad reputation amongst students in the school. During the start of year feast, Harry’s scar hurt painfully when he first glanced at Proffessor Snape. Snape picks on Harry during potions class, and takes two points off Harry during the first lesson. This relationship between Snape and Harry, intensifies as the book and the series progresses, and it is in later books that we find out the reason behind Snape’s hatred towards Harry.
Later, during flying classes, Harry finds out that he is a natural at the broom, and even gets to play the position Seeker on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, which is a game of balls and hoops played on broomsticks, up in the air. Also, Harry is the youngest house player in over a century, as first-years are usually not allowed to play on the house’s Quidditch teams. For being on the team, Harry also receives his own broomstick, a Nimbus Two Thousand, for him to use during matches.
Throughout this time, Harry and Ron become closes friends, while they shut Hermione out, because they find her too bossy and uptight, especially about Harry and Ron’s occasionally bout of rule-breaking. Hermione, who is easily the smartest person of the first-years at Hogwarts, has no friends, and this further upsets her when Ron says something mean about her. However, after Harry and Ron save her from a troll during Halloween, Hermione is more relaxed about their rule-breaking, and the two accept her as their friend. This friendship plays a very pivotal role later on in the book, as well as in the other books, when Hermione helps Harry and Ron out during their adventures with her gift in magic, and her encyclopaedic brain.
During the start of year feast, Dumbledore had warned the pupils not to go near the 3rd floor corridor. This warning Harry had forgotten in the midst of settling into Hogwarts, until he accidentally enters the corridor one night during a midnight wizard’s duel with Draco. He turns to face a large three-headed dog, and runs out of the corridor to escape. The dog looked as if it was guarding something, and as time goes by, Harry is convinced that it is guarding an important parcel that Hagrid had picked up in a vault in Gringotts (on Dumbledore’s orders) on the day he and Harry went to Gringotts. Also, the Daily Prophet (the wizard’s newspaper) had reported a break in on the same vault, later that very day.
On the night the troll enters the school and attacks Hermione, Harry had spotted Professor Snape going off to the restricted third-floor corridor. After another incident where Harry nearly gets knocked off the Quidditch pitch by a tampered broom, he and his friends suspect Professor Snape to be behind it as well. During their meeting with Hagrid, he accidentally slips out that the item that is being guarded is “none of your business, and only between Professor Dumbledore and Nicholas Flamel”. Harry and his friends, convinced that Professor Snape is out to steal that item, do research on Nicholas Flamel in order to solve the mystery and protect the item. Hermione then finds out that Flamel is the only known maker of the Philosopher’s stone, which is allows for any metal to be transformed into gold, and can produce the Elixir of Life which bestows upon the drinker, immortality.
During a detention period in the Forbidden Forest, Harry bumps into a centaur who saves his life and accidentally watches a hooded creature feeding on unicorn blood, which according to the centaur, keeps a person alive, but only just, as it is a monstrous thing to slay a unicorn. After talking to the centaur, Harry is convinced that the hooded creature is Voldemort, who is using Professor Snape to get the Philosopher’s stone in order to return back to power. Harry and his friends fail to reach Professor Dumbledore in time to tell him, as he went off to London, and are told off by Professor McGonagall for trying to “act smart”. So, the three decide to go after the stone themselves, in order to stop Snape and save the stone, as well as the future of the wizarding world.
Hiding under Harry’s invisibility cloak (which mysteriously appeared on Harry’s bed on Christmas morning), they set off the for the corridor, and put the three-headed dog to sleep by playing a flute. They enter the trapdoor below the beast, and using Hermione’s skilful magic, conjure up some flames to ward off the Devil’s Snare which crept up their legs. They then fly on broomsticks to capture flying keys in order to open the door which led to a dead troll lying in the middle of the next room. Then they play a game of real-life chess, where Ron gets hurt when he loses a move, but in doing so leave Harry and Hermione to checkmate the opponent’s king. The two continue to the next room where Hermione solves a logic puzzle to uncover the potion that sends Harry into the next room, while sending her back to Ron to find help for him.
In the last room, Harry is shocked to find out that it is not Professor Snape as he expected to see, but Professor Quirrel who is trying to steal the stone. The last task is to figure out the logic behind the “Mirror of Erised”, which Quirrel failed to, and Harry did, as he had encountered the mirror before, on one of his nightly ventures. Harry then finds the stone, and escapes from Quirrel (and Voldemort, who was sharing his soul) by using his skin, which Voldemort could not touch as Harry was protected by his mother’s ancient spell. Harry nearly passes out from the pain, but was luckily saved by Professor Dumbledore, who turns up in time.
Harry misses the last Quidditch match of the season as he was unconscious, but he manages to save the wizarding world from Voldemort once again. He finishes his first-year at Hogwarts, and returns back to Privet Drive with the Dursleys.
You just sort of retold the story, but however you added a bit of analysis...
45 points
