Dumbledore is, at least partly, faking his senility
Ah. I couldn’t figure out where the “is he crazy or isn’t he?” subplot was going. Of course he’s in the early stages of dementia. Thank you. (And there’s another reason Dementors are better used as a symbol for death than for depression: they’re named for the gradual death of the mind.)
Not sure that flies. He doesn’t act anything like the early-stage dementia patients I’ve met personally, and the apparent medical consensus on dementia’s behavioral symptoms isn’t much closer. He does act a lot like I might expect of someone to trying to project an image of erraticism without any particular knowledge of psychology.
I agree. I’m not suggesting his behaviour resembles that of dementia patients. I don’t, in general, try to predict the events of the story by modeling the characters as people, since they’re not. The question I’m trying to answer is “What is this doing in the story?” Whether Dumbledore turned out to be fundamentally sane or insane, the outcome wouldn’t be surprising. It wouldn’t serve any larger purpose. It has no pedagogical value, no bearing on the story’s major themes, nothing to justify the deviation from canon. The actual mystery is not whether he’s only pretending to be crazy but why the subject keeps coming up.
This is the only satisfactory answer I’ve seen so far: that he’s pretending to be crazy to conceal advancing senility. It’s not, I realize, strongly supported by the text, but it is strongly consonant with what I already believe. My model of Eliezer-as-author says that he wouldn’t merely symbolize the cognitive decline of aging as a supernatural process (‘Dementation’) which steals the memories of its victims. I expect him to hammer the point home. And impassioned speeches on the horror of aging will have a lot more weight in the presence of a character undergoing the real thing.
Ah. I couldn’t figure out where the “is he crazy or isn’t he?” subplot was going. Of course he’s in the early stages of dementia. Thank you. (And there’s another reason Dementors are better used as a symbol for death than for depression: they’re named for the gradual death of the mind.)
Not sure that flies. He doesn’t act anything like the early-stage dementia patients I’ve met personally, and the apparent medical consensus on dementia’s behavioral symptoms isn’t much closer. He does act a lot like I might expect of someone to trying to project an image of erraticism without any particular knowledge of psychology.
I do like the connection with Dementors, though.
I agree. I’m not suggesting his behaviour resembles that of dementia patients. I don’t, in general, try to predict the events of the story by modeling the characters as people, since they’re not. The question I’m trying to answer is “What is this doing in the story?” Whether Dumbledore turned out to be fundamentally sane or insane, the outcome wouldn’t be surprising. It wouldn’t serve any larger purpose. It has no pedagogical value, no bearing on the story’s major themes, nothing to justify the deviation from canon. The actual mystery is not whether he’s only pretending to be crazy but why the subject keeps coming up.
This is the only satisfactory answer I’ve seen so far: that he’s pretending to be crazy to conceal advancing senility. It’s not, I realize, strongly supported by the text, but it is strongly consonant with what I already believe. My model of Eliezer-as-author says that he wouldn’t merely symbolize the cognitive decline of aging as a supernatural process (‘Dementation’) which steals the memories of its victims. I expect him to hammer the point home. And impassioned speeches on the horror of aging will have a lot more weight in the presence of a character undergoing the real thing.