Summary
Harry tells Ron, Hermione, and, by letter, Sirius, everything he learned in his meeting with Dumbledore and everything he saw in Dumbledore's Pensieve. Meanwhile, Hermione is still determined to figure out how Rita Skeeter manages to eavesdrop on so many private conversation undetected. She also insists that Harry learn as many hexes as he can before the final challenge of the tournament so that he is armed for whatever obstacle the maze presents him. She and Ron help Harry learn an impediment hex which slows down an attacker, and a reducto hex which blasts solid matter out of the way. On the morning of the third task, the champions meet with their families in the chamber of the Great Hall; Harry doesn't expect anyone to show up for him, but when he walks into the chamber he finds Mrs. Weasley and Bill waiting for him. Mrs. Weasley explains that Percy and Arthur and swamped with Ministry work, especially Percy who is being subject to questioning about Barty Crouch's mail-in instructions to him.
Harry spends the morning touring Mrs. Weasley and Bill around Hogwarts, walking through the sunny grounds and showing them new additions to the campus. By lunchtime, after morning exams, Ron and Hermione join Harry and the rest of the Weasleys in the Great Hall. They enjoy a nice meal together before the final event starts. Harry and the champions are called forward to proceed to the Quidditch field, and Hermione and the Weasleys wish Harry the best of luck.
As the champions enter the maze, night has fallen. Harry proceeds deep into the maze without too many obstacles. Cedric is burned by a Blast-Ended Skrewt, but escapes. At one point, Harry hears Fleur scream from somewhere in the maze, but he doesn't see her send up red sparks, so he figures she is okay. Harry faces a Skrewt, ten feet tall and covered in a hard outer shell. He manages to stun it by hexing its soft underbelly. Harry turns a corner and finds Viktor Krum performing the Cruciatus curse on Cedric, one of the Unforgivable Curses. Harry stuns Krum, Cedric recovers, and they send up red sparks over Krum's stunned body so someone comes and retrieves him. They are both shocked that he would perform such a curse on his peer.
Cedric and Harry split up once more. Harry faces a sphinx and solves her riddle, so she lets him pass. Harry and Cedric are now both approaching the Triwizard Cup when Cedric is almost taken down by a giant spider. Together, Cedric and Harry manage to stun the spider out of commission; however, in the course of fighting the spider, Harry badly injures his leg. Cedric and Harry both try to convince the other to take the Cup for themselves. Both Harry and Cedric humbly admit that they each helped each other an immense amount, and would not have been able to get this far without each other. So they finally decide to both grab the Cup at the same time, to take a joint victory for Hogwarts. But when they do grab the Cup, it turns out to be a Portkey and transports them away from the maze.
The Portkey transports Harry and Cedric to a graveyard in Little Hangleton. At first, Harry and Cedric are unsure whether the teleportation is part of the task, but they both draw their wands in case they encounter danger. A hooded figure approaches them, swaddling what looks like a baby in a bundle of robes. A voice from aboves says, coldly, "Kill the spare" (258) and before Cedric or Harry can react, the hooded figure blasts a killing curse at Cedric. To Harry's shock, his friend Cedric is immediately killed. The hooded figure hits Harry and drags him over to a headstone with the name Tom Riddle etched into it. He ties Harry to the headstone, at which point Harry realizes who he is; it's Peter Pettigrew, also known as "Wormtail."
Pettigrew unwraps the bundle to reveal a scaly, sickly looking child. He drops the child into a boiling cauldron. He then performs a ritual in which he extracts bone particles from Tom Riddle Sr.'s grave, cuts off his own hand and deposits it in the cauldron, and takes some of Harry's blood and drops it into the cauldron. Upon finishing the ritual, the cauldron shoots bright sparks into the air, followed by a thick white smoke. From the smoke emerges a tall, skeletal man with a face like a serpent. It is Voldemort, finally risen.
Once Voldemort emerges from the mist, fully embodied, he presses his wand against Pettigrew's Dark Mark tattoo, thus summoning all the remaining Death Eaters. After a few minutes, a small crowd of Death Eaters appears, hooded and cloaked. Among them are Lucius Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle, and other familiar names Harry has heard thrown around by Sirius and Ministry wizards. Voldemort scolds his followers for abandoning him for so many years, leaving him disembodied in an Albanian forest to fend for himself and survive by possessing small animals. He even tortures one of his followers with the Cruciatus curse.
After Voldemort is certain that no more of his followers will appear, he launches into an expository account of his thirteen years in exile. He explains why Harry was able to defeat him as a baby and that it was actually not Harry's own doing, but his mother's will to sacrifice herself that imbued Harry with such strong, old magic that deflected Voldemort's curse back to him and destroyed his body. Voldemort explains that the encounter with this old magic was really a fitting test for the many safeguards he constructed against his own mortality. Of his time in exile, Voldemort explains that he was less than a spirit, without a body, only able to act through the bodies of others. He recalls when, four years ago (in book one), he inhabited the body of Professor Quirrell and almost attained everlasting life with the Sorcerer's Stone.
He then recounts his whole family history and his more recent journey up to this point, explaining how Wormtail encountered Bertha Jorkins in the Albanian countryside and brought her to the place Voldemort was hiding in the forest. Together they tortured her for information and used powerful memory charms on her until her body and mind were all but destroyed. Voldemort plainly admits to killing her. After he finishes his long monologue, he informs his followers that he will give Harry Potter one last chance, in this graveyard, to duel him. He will prove in front of all of his remaining Death Eaters that Harry Potter is no match for the mighty Lord Voldemort. He then commands Wormtail to return Harry's wand to him.
Harry struggles to stand up, his leg still badly injured from the run-in with the giant spider. Voldemort forces Harry to bow to him before their duel begins. The Death Eaters laugh as Harry bends down before Voldemort. Then Voldemort hits Harry with the Cruciatus curse, and Harry writhes on the ground in more pain than he's ever experienced before. He recovers and runs for cover. When he emerges from cover he is filled with resolve to fight; if he dies, he thinks, at least he will die fighting like his parents. He casts a disarming charm as Voldemort casts a killing curse and their spell beams meet in mid air and connect their wands with a golden beam of light. The reaction lifts them both high off the ground above the Death Eaters. The golden beam of light causes Harry's wand to glow hot and shake almost uncontrollably. He has to fight to keep the wand in his grip.
Fear washes over Voldemort's face. He clearly wasn't anticipating this amount of difficulty, and now he may fail to defeat Harry Potter again, this time in the plain view of all of his remaining followers. As the gold beam of light connecting their wands splinters into more volatile beams, the ghosts of Voldemort's victims emerge from his wand tip. Cedric, Bertha Jorkins, Frank the groundskeeper, and finally, Harry's parents. The ghosts encourage Harry to hold on. James Potter tells Harry that he must break the bond between their wands and run as fast as he can back to the Portkey. They can buy him a few seconds, but he has to move quickly. So, following his father's instructions, Harry makes a break for it. Cedric, as a final request, asks Harry to take his body back to his parents. So Harry summons the Portkey, holding on to Cedric's body, and transports back to Hogwarts.
Harry returns to the center of the field holding Cedric's body close. He hears a crowd of voices surrounding him and looks up to see Dumbledore, Cornelius Fudge, Moody, and various other adult wizards. Fudge realizes that Cedric Diggory is dead. Panic spreads like wildfire. Harry can barely form words due to the searing pain and disorientation of the situation. Before order is restored, Mad-Eye whisks Harry away from the crowd and pulls him into his office. He sits Harry down and gives him a potion to reorient his senses. But then Moody begins asking Harry about the Dark Lord's return. His tone shifts, and suddenly Moody seems to regard Voldemort with reverence and awe. He betrays his allegiance to Voldemort, calling himself Voldemort's most loyal servant. He turns his wand on Harry, but before he can curse him, Dumbledore bursts into the room with McGonagall and Snape. Dumbledore stuns Moody and sends the two others to round up Winky and Hagrid's bloodhound, Fang. Then Dumbledore explains to Harry that this man lying before them is not Mad-Eye Moody, but an imposter.
Dumble unlocks Mad-Eye's trunk to reveal a deep dungeon room where the real Moody lies, unconscious and ghastly thin from malnourishment. Dumbledore explains that the person posing as Moody has been using polyjuice potion to transform into him, but the potion only lasts an hour, and so he would soon turn back to his original form. Harry and Dumbledore watch as the Moody imposter on the floor turns into Barty Crouch Junior. Dumbledore feeds Crouch Jr. Snape's most powerful truth potion and interrogates him. Crouch explains, under the spell of the potion, how his mother and father broke him out of Azkaban. His mother, using polyjuice potion, posed as Crouch Jr. and stayed in prison as Crouch and his son were able to leave undetected. Crouch's mother died in Azkaban, still posing as her own son, while Crouch and Crouch Jr. remained on the outside. Crouch Sr. kept Crouch Jr. under the Imperius curse the whole time he was free and forced him to remain under the cover of an invisibility cloak. Winky, the house-elf, served as Crouch Jr.'s ward and caretaker.
Winky is the one who convinced Crouch Sr. to let Crouch Jr. attend the Quidditch World Cup under the cloak, but in the course of the match, Jr. shook off his father's Imperius curse and escaped into the woods, where, using the wand he stole from Harry's back pocket, he shot the Dark Mark into the sky. Learning from Bertha Jorkins of Crouch Jr.'s escape from Azkaban, Voldemort managed to track him down at Crouch Sr.'s house, with the help of Pettigrew. Voldemort and Pettigrew placed Crouch Sr. under the Imperius curse and sent Jr. to abduct Mad-Eye Moody before he left for Hogwarts. Crouch Jr.'s mission, as Mad-Eye, was to coach Harry Potter into reaching the end of the Triwizard Tournament where, upon touching the Cup, he would be transported to Little Hangleton. Under Snape's truth potion, Crouch Jr. admits to killing his own father in the Forbidden Forest. The whole time he is confessing, Winky is weeping, urging him to stop talking.
Dumbledore commands McGonagall to stand guard over Crouch Jr.'s stunned body and leads Harry to his office, where Sirius is waiting to receive them both. Then, Dumbledore asks Harry to explain to them both, in as much detail as possible, what happened in Little Hangleton. Dumbledore recognizes how hard this will be for Harry, who is still reeling with both physical and emotional pain, and still bleeding from where Pettigrew cut him; but Dumbledore explains that it is of vital and urgent importance that Harry tell them what happened as soon as possible so that they can begin mounting their defenses against Voldemort. Harry tells Dumbledore and Sirius what took place in the graveyard, and Dumbledore explains that the reason he and Voldemort's wands bonded like that is because they share the same core: two phoenix feathers plucked from Dumbledore's very own phoenix, Fawkes, whose tears heal Harry's fresh wounds.
Dumbledore then takes Harry down to the hospital wing, where he is met by the Weasleys. Dumbledore warns everyone not to interrogate Harry because he needs rest. Harry dozes off but wakes up shortly after when a commotion breaks out in the hospital wing between Minerva McGonagall and Cornelius Fudge. Dumbledore scolds McGonagall for not standing watch over Crouch Jr. but she quickly explains that Fudge let a Dementor into the chamber with him, and the Dementor immediately administered a fatal kiss to Crouch, sucking out his soul and ruining any chance of a testimony. Dumbledore tells Fudge that Voldemort has risen from the dead and now walks among them, fully embodied. Fudge refuses to believe him. Dumbledore urges Fudge to heed his advice; he tells him to relinquish control of Azkaban from Dementors who, Dumbledore knows, will pledge their allegiance to Voldemort as soon as he offers them protection. He also advises Fudge to send envoys to the remaining giants before Voldemort can recruit them. Fudge thinks that both Dumbledore and Harry are crazy and refuses to believe that Voldemort has returned. He thinks that any effort to mobilize and prepare the public will only spread undue hysteria, and he storms away. Dumbledore is prepared to take action with or without the help of the Ministry.
The rest of the school year passes somberly with small moments of brightness. The farewell feast is not its usual romp of school spirit and revelry, but rather a grave and serious gathering of memorial and warning. Dumbledore speaks to the entire student body as well as their guests from Durmstrang and Beauxbatons. He asks everyone to raise a glass to Cedric Diggory and extols Cedric as a virtuous, kind, and loyal young man. Dumbledore then tells everyone how Cedric died; he tells the entire school he was murdered by Voldemort and that Voldemort has returned to power. Dumbledore admits that the Ministry does not want him to share this information with them, but he feels that honesty is more important than ever as they prepare to face extremely dark times.
On the train to King's Cross, Hermione tells Ron and Harry that Rita Skeeter is an unregistered Animagus, like Sirius. Except, instead of turning into a large, black dog, Skeeter turns into a beetle. Hermione then produces a glass jar from her bag in which she has captured Skeeter, in her beetle form. By turning into a bug, Skeeter is able to spy on whomever she pleases, quite literally a "fly on the wall," except instead of a fly, she's a beetle. Hermione explains that she plans to release Skeeter in London, but that she's demanded that she not write any more salacious stories under threat of reporting her as an unregistered Animagus to the Ministry. As the train rolls into King's Cross, Harry hangs back in the compartment with Fred and George. He gives them his Triwizard winnings as seed money to start their joke shop. They are reluctant to take it, but Harry insists, saying, "We could all do with a few laughs. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need them more than usual before long" (296).
Analysis
In the final chapters of The Goblet of Fire, Rowling returns to Little Hangleton, thus framing the narrative with this reference to Lord Voldemort's early life and bolstering the sense that his character will play a more direct, active role in the series from here on out. Book four marks the first truly independent embodiment of Lord Voldemort since the beginning of the series, and much of his long monologues in Chapters 32 and 33 address this very issue of embodiment. Before Pettigrew completes the ritual, Voldemort has had to rely on the bodies of small animals to shuttle his fractured soul around. In book one, he inhabits Professor Quirrell and in book two, he controls Ginny Weasley with a possessed magical object. In book three, he isn't even the primary villain being chased—that, instead, is Peter Pettigrew, who Harry spares only for him to return to Lord Voldemort in Albania and help him rise again, more powerful than before. Thus, The Goblet of Fire marks an important turning point in the series where the "big bad," who up until this point has manifested merely as a terrifying specter in the collective memory of the wizarding community and as a private demon of Harry's (being responsible for his parents' deaths), is now here, in the text, in the flesh, a speaking, thinking character with whom Harry and his friends must now directly contend.
The overall tonal shift in book four from its predecessors aligns with this watershed moment in the series. In the final chapters, Dumbledore frequently references that "dark times" that lie ahead, and other characters, like Hagrid and Harry, start to parrot this notion of impending darkness. In Dumbledore's final address to his students before their train rides home, he says, “It is my belief—and never have I so hoped that I am mistaken—that we are all facing dark and difficult times" (292). When Harry gifts Fred and George his Triwizard winnings as seed money for their joke shop, he cites his feeling that "we're going to need [laughs] more than usual before long" (296). And when Harry, Ron, and Hermione visit Hagrid for the first time after the Tournament, Hagrid fully admits that he always knew Voldemort would return. His take is rather optimistic; he says, “What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does" (290). But despite ending on this note of optimism, there is no denying that book four takes on heavier subjects than its predecessors, and the darker tone reflects this, especially in the second half of the novel (though certainly as early as the first chapter, when Rowling portrays the murder of Frank Bryce in Little Hangleton).
One of Harry's friends and classmates dies right beside him; he has to take his dead body back to Hogwarts to his parents. Harry and his classmates learn the Unforgivable Curses from Mad-Eye Moody, who isn't actually Mad-Eye Moody but an active Death Eater posing as Mad-Eye while he keeps the real Mad-Eye locked in a trunk. And it is this imposter who, in their first Defense Against the Dark Arts class of the year, tells students that they will divert their attention from dangerous magical creatures to hexes. He says, "I’m here to bring you up to scratch on what wizards can do to each other" (85). This notion of the cruelty that wizards are capable of doing to one another is a hugely important theme in the book and runs parallel with the main cast of characters' coming-of-age. In The Goblet of Fire, Harry, Ron, Hermione, and their friends are exposed to elements of their universe of which they were hitherto unaware. The concept of "Aurors" as an occupation, essentially wizarding secret-service members devoted to hunting down and jailing (or killing) Dark wizards, is introduced in this book. Harry learns the truth about Neville's parents, who were Aurors until they were captured by Death Eaters and tortured into a state of permanent insanity; they still reside at St. Mungo's hospital and when Neville visits them, they have no idea who he is. Needless to say, Harry and his classmates do a fair amount of growing up in The Goblet of Fire. They shed a lot of their naiveté and replace it with a world-weariness that Mad-Eye Moody, with his philosophy of "constant vigilance," would approve of. It seems, by the looks of things, that their newfound vigilance will come in handy going forward in the series.
