Everything I am writing is purely my opinion and having read Harry Potter a million times (really a million times, it is almost sad), I am amazed by how I tend to ask myself new questions each time and how I seem to always find something I haven't thought about before.
While reading Half-Blood Prince, specifically the part where Dumbledore tries to explain to Harry about Lord Voldemort's past, and a little bit of why he did what he did, I was also curious about this -- Was he a bad person by birth? Do people become who they are as they are born or is it the circumstances that make people who they are. Are they right or wrong? Who is to tell what is right and what is wrong? In the end, is it all simply subjective?
(I do not own this image. Found it on Google, great work and credit to whoever created it)
These are a few excerpts from the book,
"Those whom I could persuade to talk told me that Riddle was obsessed with his parentage. This is understandable, of course; he had grown up in an orphanage and naturally wished to know how he came to be there. It seems that he searched in vain for some trace of Tom Riddle Senior on the shields in the trophy room, on the lists of prefects in the old school records, even in the books of wizarding history. Finally, he was forced to accept that his father had never set foot in Hogwarts. I believe that it was then that he dropped the name forever, assumed the identity of Lord Voldemort, and began his investigations into his previously despised mother’s family – the woman whom, you will remember, he had thought could not be a witch if she had succumbed to the shameful human weakness of death"
There are two questions I would like to ponder, one is "Why did he refuse to believe his mother was a witch until the very last moment" and "Why did he consider her a death, a shameful human weakness, and went on fear it the most and hence tried to conquer it"
Ok, here is a baby boy born in an orphanage surrounded by kids who had no parents, no one to love and learn love from, and the only caregivers were the volunteers and people who worked at the orphanage as a job. A few things he knew as he grew up were -- his parents were dead and hence he was abandoned and he was there! So death sucked. Death is bad, death separates families, death (of this mother) is what got him abandoned and so death is his greatest enemy. Another thing, parents! He was an orphan, different perhaps not from other kids around him but from kids everywhere else. Those kids felt something, they had something. It is the presence of parents! Apparently, parents did any thing for their kids. Everything he sees, all the lessons he is learning seem to talk about love and sacrifice and the abundant care children receive from their parents. Parents are ready to die for their kids. His mother could and should have done anything and everything she can to live for him and care for him, but she did not. So perhaps it was not her choice, so perhaps she was not strong, she was NOT A WITCH. Because if she was a witch, she would have died, would she? Because it did not seem to match what he learned about parents?!
These thoughts, unchecked and unchallenged, on parental love, sacrifice, and death would alone have been enough to completely take a clean, young mind and convert it into a venomous human being called Lord Voldemort.
Another excerpt from the book is, "As he moved up the school, he gathered about him a group of dedicated friends; I call them that, for want of a better term, although as I have already indicated, Riddle undoubtedly felt no affection for any of them"
Of course, he would trust no one. How could he, why would he when everything he has told himself and raised himself to believe is based on abandonment and when he clearly associates every human (be it a muggle and later a wizard) with death and eventually everyone is going to pass on but he had plans to remain forever, so he is very clear and calculative about this fact thought (everything about feelings is just a thought and not a fact as there is no objective truth or lie) that he needed no one.
And this is how I believe the young Tom Riddle had turned into a ruthless, self-serving Lord Voldemort whose greatest fear and weakness was death, strived his entire life to not succumb to it but in the end, ultimately faced death in the worst possible way without ever making peace with any of his short-comings or misconceptions or see an alternate life where he could have approached things differently.
If you read this and have thoughts on it, please share and let's ponder this together!
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