Harry Potter Essay

The novel opens with a description of the Dursley family, a middle class family that lives in Little Whinging, Surrey. They were a very unusual family. Mr. Dursley was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. His wife, Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde, they had a son called Dudley in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.

Harry has grown to become a pale, skinny boy with black hair that sticks up all over the place and bright green eyes. From a young age, Harry is told that his parents were killed in a car crash but has no other information about them, not even a photograph. Harry’s cousin Dudley dominates the household, bullying Harry with his gang of friends and being spoiled rotten by Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia. While Dudley has two bedrooms, one for his bed and one for all of his broken toys, Harry is relegated to the small cupboard under the stairs. Although he strives to avoid attracting attention, Harry can’t deny that strange things often happen around him. Once Aunt Petunia cut off all of his hair in a fit of frustration, and it grew back to its original length in time for school the next day. Another time, Harry was being chased by Dudley’s gang and suddenly found himself on the kitchen roof.

On Dudley’s eleventh birthday, Harry accompanies the family and Dudley’s best friend, Piers Polkiss, to the zoo. While Harry is in the reptile house, the glass front of the boa constrictor cage suddenly vanishes. Harry is unable to explain the incident, but Uncle Vernon blames him anyway and restricts him to the cupboard under the stairs until the summer holidays.

One day, mysterious letters begin to arrive for Harry. Uncle Vernon refuses to let Harry read the letter but tells him that it was addressed to him by mistake. Over the next few days, more and more of the letters arrive in the house, but Uncle Vernon keeps Harry from intercepting any of them. In an extreme effort to escape from the letters, Uncle Vernon takes the family to a desolate shack on an island on the night before Harry’s eleventh birthday.

When the clock strikes midnight and Harry wishes himself a silent “Harry Birthday,” there is a loud bang on the door and Hagrid enters. Hagrid introduces himself as the Keeper of the Keys at Hogwarts and then explains that Harry is a wizard who has been admitted to Hogwarts in order to study magic. Harry discovers that the Dursleys have always been aware of his magical abilities but have attempted to stifle them and make him “normal.” Moreover, Harry learns the truth about his parents’ murder by Voldemort.

The following day, Hagrid takes Harry to Diagon Alley in London to shop for school supplies. Their first stop is the wizarding bank, Gringotts, where Harry is shown to his family vault and realizes that his parents have left him with a comfortable fortune of wizarding gold. During their trip to the

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