by Dave Simmons

Created on: October 14, 2007

It's very easy to consider Snape an untrustworthy character; Rowling spends an awful lot of time through the series setting him up as a very unlikeable character. He's unpleasant to the hero, play favourites, is unpleasant to look at, and has, to say the least, a very chequered past. Indeed, in most of the books, if villainy is afoot, Snape is Harry's first choice as to who's probably causing it. He's stealing the philosopher's stone, he's opening the chamber of secrets, he's betraying the order of the phoenix, and so on, and so on.

We learn, however, that right through the books, Dumbledore trusts Snape completely. And Dumbledore, in the role he plays, cannot possibly be wrong. He is the sage figure and mentor of the series, who knows all and sees all, is affable and calm, and who is immensely powerful, but wise enough to not generally get directly involved in Harry's escapades. No doubt you could draw analogies to Gandalf in Tolkien's work, in that whereas either could no doubt have sorted any of the problems out in about half an hour (or roughly a single chapter), by acting more passively, the other characters are allowed to grow from their experiences, and the final ending, whilst hard won, is a lot more satisfactory.

So, Snape is trusted by Dumbledore. A canny reader would therefore realise that Snape is meant to be trusted by the reader, regardless of what any of the characters think. By the end of the Half-Blood prince, I suspect we were meant to think that Snape had finally shown his true colours and we, as the audience, were now meant to hate him, but I personally found it pretty obvious that whatever revelations would come about in the last book, we would discover that Snape had a very good reason for what he did.

I also have a lot of sympathy for the character. True, he's not terribly pleasant as a person, and certainly not to Harry, but we learn as the books go on that Harry's parents weren't terribly fair to him, either, and a lot of how he treats his pupils could be attributed to this.

Do we trust him? To sum up, I would say that if you're reading the books for the first time, the author is trying to get you not to. Even given his background, however, I would say that Snape turns out to be a lot more trustworthy than a lot of the characters in the books, however. Ninety percent of the people that work for the Ministry of Magic, for instance. Is this Rowling showing a subconscious mistrust of government figures, perhaps?

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