I read your pre-edit reply first--and at that point, my thoughts were along the lines of **yes**. It's amazing how this series in which one character's name gets put on every single book can have the most heart-rending emotional focus and arguably the biggest emotional struggle and the most heroism--is a completely other character. Did JK Rowling know she was doing that? Was it inadvertent or by design.

Then I read your added-back-in edit and am in pieces all over again because that pathos is one of the things I feel the strongest in life: The fact that there are people whose lives are walking through hot coals and they never even know that there are people with buckets of water for them. They never get to know.

I think that's why there have to be patronuses that act with freedom and seeming self-awareness and why JK Rowling had to write the epilogue, so that *we* can be aware. But it doesn't make his not knowing--his dying without knowing--any less heart-breaking.

he shares the essential quality of heartbreaking heroism which has nothing to do with being a nice or even always a very good person. --I share with you a life-long fascination with and concern for characters like this.

Second ETA: It's never too late. It's gone somewhere now.