Rebelling against Prophecy in Harry Potter and The Underland Chronicles

In recent years, two stories about a boy becoming a man through extraordinary trials, courage, self-sacrifice, and critical thinking—one essentially Christian and the other insistently atheist—have shared the theme of prophecy. J. K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins have each written series in which an eleven-year-old enters a new world burdened with a prophecy foretelling his early death. These predictions are revealed piecemeal so that only in the final book of each series does the boy learn of his fate. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and last installment in Rowling’s series (1997–2007), Harry finds out that certain death accompanies the distinction of being “the chosen one” in the wizarding world. Gregor learns the same thing in Collins’s Gregor and the Code of Claw, the fifth and final book in The Underland Chronicles (2003–7): the prophetic line “When the warrior has been killed” refers to him (4). Rowling and Collins work through the theme of the prophetic in their narratives with a mixture of credulous and resistant characters. Both authors emphasize that prophecy is open to interpretation, and so to manipulation, by anyone, on any side.

As a narrative device, prophecy is ancient. Entailing inspiration from the gods or God, insight into the future and on the present state of things, the implications of prophecy are capacious. Rowling and Collins use it to propel their plots, to create suspense, and to explain the seemingly inexplicable, but prophecy is ultimately abandoned by the narratives, as actions replace words and the present breaks away from the past at story’s end. While seeking to convey important messages about justice, tolerance, and peace, both authors avail themselves of the forceful motif of the death of the hero. The two series are nevertheless profoundly different, for although both Rowling and Collins are concerned with preventing unnecessary death, only Rowling’s text urges the reader to think through and accept death’s inevitability, as well as its mystery. Consequently, a deep gulf opens between the depictions of prophecy in the two series. In Harry Potter, prophecy is subject to human error; in the Underland series, it is nothing more than human error.

Harry Potter’s near-death and orphaning were the evil wizard Voldemort’s attempt to prevent the fulfillment of a prophecy. Voldemort paradoxically realizes the prophecy by turning this “boy who lived” into the tyrant’s own nemesis,¹ which plays an increasingly significant role thereafter. A consideration of Collins’s books—a series that, apart from recent work by Sarah Fiona Winters in the pages of this journal—has met with scant attention due to the proximate release of Collins’s popular Hunger Games series (2008–10). The Underland Chronicles challenge a number of Judeo-Christian traditions in Western children’s literature,² and it seems likely, given the overwhelming awareness of Harry Potter at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that the series responds to Rowling.³

The plot of Harry Potter is sufficiently well known to omit repeating. The Underland Chronicles are about a poor boy living in a small New York apartment with his mother, two sisters, and grandmother. His father, a science teacher, has been inexplicably absent for two years. In the first book, Gregor the Overlander (2003), the title character and his two-year-old sister, Boots, discover his whereabouts in a dark land under Manhattan that Collins has likened to a “what if” version of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Gregor and Boots fall down an air vent to a world where sentient species, including giant cockroaches, rats, bats, mice, ants, and paper-pale, violet-eyed humans, battle alongside and against each other for survival. Gregor is hailed and feared, as the long awaited warrior prophesied by Bartholomew of Sandwich must make critical decisions through the five books involving negotiation, diplomacy, fighting, subterfuge, and allegiances. He encounters a royal family: the kindly sage Vikus, his war-mongering wife, Solovet, and their proud heir, Luxa, who will grow to love Gregor. Gregor increasingly finds that he is entrapped by the...