Harry Potter and the Dursley Family

The novel opens with a description of the Dursley family, a middle-class household that lives in Little Whinging, Surrey. Vernon and Petunia Dursley are consistently worried that a person will discover out about Petunia’s decidedly “unDursleyish” witch sister, Lily, and their worries are justified when Lily’s son, Harry, is left on their doorstep. James Potter, Lily’s husband, had been murdered by the dark wizard, Voldemort, but when Voldemort attempted to kill Harry, his power somehow was damaged.

Harry becomes the only living person ever to survive the killing curse, and the only sign of his encounter with Voldemort is a exclusive lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead. Due to the fact Harry does not have any other living relatives. Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts College of Witchcraft and Wizardry, decides to leave him with the Dursleys till he is old sufficient to attend Hogwarts.A decade later, Harry has grown to grow to be a pale, skinny boy with black hair that sticks up all more than the location and vibrant green eyes. From a young age, Harry is told that his parents were killed in a automobile crash but has no other info about them, not even a photograph. Harry’s cousin Dudley dominates the household, bullying Harry with his pals and being spoiled rotten by Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia. Even though Dudley has two bedrooms– a single for his bed and a single for all of his unused toys.

Harry is offered a the little cupboard beneath the stairs. Although he strives to stay away from attracting attention, Harry can not deny that strange factors often take place around him. After Aunt Petunia cut off all of his hair in a fit of frustration, and it grew back to its original length in time for college the next day. One more time, Harry was getting chased by Dudley’s gang and abruptly discovered himself on the kitchen roof.

On Dudley’s eleventh birthday, Harry accompanies the household and Dudley’s best pal, Piers Polkiss, to the zoo. Even though Harry is in the reptile property, the glass front of the boa constrictor cage abruptly vanishes. Harry is unable to explain the incident, but Uncle Vernon blames him anyway and restricts him to the cupboard below the stairs until the holidays. One day, unknown letters begin to arrive for Harry. Uncle Vernon refuses to let Harry study the letter but tells him that it was addressed to him by mistake. More than the subsequent couple of days, much more and much more of these letters arrive in the property, but Uncle Vernon keeps Harry from reading any of them. In an extreme work to escape from the letters, Uncle Vernon requires the family to an isolated shack on an island on the night just before Harry’s 11th birthday.

As 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 accepted into Hogwarts in order to study magic. Harry discovers that the Dursleys have usually been aware of his magical skills but have attempted to hide them and make him “normal.” Then, Harry discovered what really happened to his parents’, they were murdered by Voldemort.

The following day, Hagrid requires Harry to Diagon Alley in London to shop for school supplies. Their very first stop is Gringotts, the wizarding bank, exactly where Harry is shown to his family vault and realizes that his parents have left him with a comfy fortune of wizard gold. During their trip to the bank, Hagrid makes a quit at Vault 713 and removes a mysterious package: “Hogwarts organization for Dumbledore”, he explains.

Right after the bank, Harry visits ‘Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions’ for his plain black school robes and ‘Flourish and Blotts’ for his school textbooks, as well as other shops for parchment and potion ingredients. Hagrid buys Harry a white owl as a birthday present, and Harry decides to name her Hedwig. Their last stop in Diagon Alley is Ollivander’s, exactly where Harry purchases a magic wand that consists of a matching core to the evil Voldemort’s wand.When the train arrives at Hogwarts, the students quickly file into the dining hall to be “sorted,” or assigned to a single of the 4 houses of Hogwarts: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. Harry worries that he will be sorted into Voldemort’s old house, Slytherin, and he tends to make a unique request to the Sorting Hat to be assigned to any other home.

The Sorting Hat considers very carefully but in the end locations Harry (as well as Ron and Hermione) in Gryffindor Residence.As the college year starts, Harry receives more attention than he ever has just before, specially when the other students catch sight of his lightning bolt-shaped scar. Even though most of his classes are enjoyable, Professor Snape, the potions instructor, appears determined to dislike Harry, and Harry notices that his scar appears to prickle anytime Snape glares at him. Following their first potions lesson, Harry and Ron choose to go to Hagrid at his cottage near the Forbidden Forest. Hagrid inadvertently reveals that Vault 713, the Gringotts vault containing the mysterious package, was broken into shortly following Harry and Hagrid’s check out to Diagon Alley.

In the course of their very first flying lesson, Neville breaks his wrist and must be taken to the hospital wing by the instructor. Malfoy grabs Neville’s Remembrall—forgotten right after his injury—and flies into the air with it. Harry flies after Malfoy to retrieve Neville’s toy and, when Malfoy throws the Remembrall to the ground, makes a spectacular dive to catch the Remembrall mere inches from the ground. Professor McGonagall observes Harry’s skilled flying and, as an alternative of punishing him for breaking the guidelines, sets him up to play Seeker on the Gryffindor Quidditch team.

Malfoy arranges a midnight duel with Harry to settle the score, and Ron, Hermione, and Neville accompany him to make certain that he stays out of problems. The four accidentally enter a forbidden corridor and come across a three-legged dog standing guard over a trapdoor. They leave the corridor speedily, but not ahead of Harry has concluded that the dog is guarding the mysterious package from Vault 713.Soon after the holidays end, Harry, Ron, and Hermione lastly discover the identity of Nicolas Flamel: he is the only known maker of the Sorcerer’s Stone, which produces the elixir of life. They recognize that the three-headed dog is guarding the Sorcerer’s Stone, and Harry starts to suspect that Snape is arranging to steal it. Harry, Ron, and Hermione also discover that Hagrid is raising an illegal dragon that was given to him by a mysterious stranger in a bar in exchange for info about the three-headed dog.

Harry and Hermione choose to smuggle the dragon to Ron’s brother, Charlie, who functions with dragons in Romania, but are caught just soon after handing off the dragon to one of Charlie’s pals. As punishment for disobeying college curfew, Harry and Hermione are sent into the Forbidden Forest with Hagrid to locate a unicorn which was wounded . When the group splits into two, Harry and Malfoy come across the physique of the unicorn just as a hooded figure crawls toward it and starts to drink its blood. Malfoy screams and runs away, but Harry is frozen in spot by an agonizing pain that is all of a sudden spreading from his scar.

As the hooded figure moves toward him, a centaur gallops in front of Harry protectively and the figure disappears. The centaur suggests that the hooded figure was Voldemort and that he drank the unicorn’s blood in order to remain alive until he can steal the Sorcerer’s Stone.Harry decides to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone just before Voldemort can. Harry, Ron, and Hermione sneak off to the forbidden corridor and get previous the three-headed dog by pulling it to sleep with music. As soon as by means of the trap door, they land on Devil’s Snare, the initial of a number of challenges place in place by the Hogwart’s teachers. As the plant’s snake-like tendrils threatened to strangle Ron and Harry, Hermione makes use of magical fire to repel the plant and break them totally free. The subsequent challenge is to pass through a room filled with hundreds of tiny flying keys. Harry flies on a broomstick to uncover the silver key that matches the lock on the door and finally snatches it out of the swarm. The door opens to reveal a giant wizard’s chessboard. An expert chess player, Ron requires the lead in this challenge and in the end sacrifices himself in order to let Harry and Hermione to attain the next challenge. When Harry and Hermione step into the subsequent space, they are quickly surrounded by flames and faced with a complicated riddle of poisonous potions.

Hermione rationally solves the riddle and offers Harry the potion required to travel to the next space and the final challenge although she returns to help Ron.In the final chamber, Harry is shocked to find neither Snape nor Voldemort, but Professor Quirrell, the meek-tempered teacher of Defense against the Dark Arts, and the Mirror of Erised. Quirrell reveals that he, not Snape, has been Voldemort’s servant all along: Quirrell jinxing Harry’s broom for the duration of the Quidditch match and drank the unicorn’s blood in the Forbidden Forest. Now, in the final challenge, Quirrell wants only to retrieve the Sorcerer’s Stone from within the Mirror of Erised. He asks his master for support, and Harry hears a disembodied voice speak from inside Quirrell, telling him to use Harry to get to it. Quirrell stands Harry in front of the mirror and orders him to inform him what he sees. Determined to keep the Stone from falling into Voldemort’s hands, Harry lies and tells Quirrell that he sees himself winning the Quidditch Cup for Gryffindor. He then actually sees himself holding the Sorcerer’s Stone and placing it in his pocket. Realizing that the Stone is now in his pocket, Harry tries to stall for time till he can escape.

Quirrell removes his turban and reveals Voldemort’s face emerging from the back of his head. Voldemort speaks straight to Harry, taunting him about the death of his parents, and then orders Quirrell to kill him. When Quirrell tries to touch Harry, his skin blisters and, even though Harry is in excruciating pain from his scar, he forces the contact with Quirrell. With Voldemort’s screams of anger echoing in his head, Harry lastly passes out. When Harry wakes up, he finds himself in the hospital wing with Dumbledore. Dumbledore discovered Harry just in the knick of time to keep Quirrell from killing him, even though Voldemort escaped after once more. Dumbledore explains that Quirrell was unable to touch Harry’s skin since of his mother’s enjoy: when Lily Potter sacrificed herself for him, she left Harry with an ancient magical protection. He knew that only Harry would be capable to retrieve the Stone from the Mirror of Erised simply because, in contrast to Quirrell and Voldemort, Harry wanted to discover the Stone but did not want to use it.



Despite the fact that Voldemort was not destroyed, Harry’s actions have kept him from regaining energy for now.At the finish of the year banquet, the members of Slytherin Property are celebrating their victory of the Home Cup for the seventh consecutive year. Surprisingly, Dumbledore awards last-minute points to Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville, which provides Gryffindor the edge over Slytherin. Harry considers it to be the ideal evening of his life and returns to commit the summer time with the Dursleys content in the friendships that he has produced at Hogwarts.