“Defeating Death”: Reflections of Pedagogy of Narrative on Harry Potter as a coming-of-age novel

Abstract

In the youth literature of the Third Millennium, the relationship between the rediscovery of the meaning of Life and the existential problem of Death turns out to be a fundamental and essential feature. This is most evident in some fantasy Sagas born between the end of the Twentieth Century and the beginning of the 2000s. In particular, the Harry Potter books – literary creation of the British writer J.K. Rowling – have inserted these themes as cornerstones of the narration itself. The aim of the present essay is to investigate what it means to relate to the themes of Life, Death and the search for Immortality on this earth through the perspective of the Pedagogy of Narrative, in order to discover the teachings that readers, young and old, can draw from this “contemporary fairy-story”, from this true coming-of-age novel set in Hogwarts.