Cassie and I have been talking this evening about Harry Potter (as both of us are rereading the series at this time. I'm on book 4, she's finishing book 1.) We've been talking about things like character development and so on, and remembering how back before the series was finished, there were a bunch of essays being written about it, analyzing it from a literary point of view. But now that the series is over, relatively few have appeared.
The problem with that is that NOW is the time when we SHOULD be analyzing the series from a literary point of view. The series is finished, and we've got the whole thing laid out in front of us, we know what happens to all the characters, we can see all the parallels. We have the complete story to analyze now, and yet hardly anyone seems to be doing it. Last year, I analyzed the various parallels between the books. This year I'm looking at the hero's journey. I didn't try to do any analysis before the series was finished, because I had no way of knowing where the story was really going.
Maybe it's because, back before the series was finished, people were more interested in analyzing the thing for purpose of figuring out what was going to happen next, whereas now the story's done, so there's nothing to figure out. But that might just be the cynical side of me talking. In fact, it probably is. I hope I'm wrong.
-Matt
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