I think that Harry’s death would be sad, but it wouldn’t be tragic. It would have been following a tried and true formula called The Hero’s Journey. It would have been an interesting twist on the formula to have Harry’s death be the actual final triumph. J.K. Rowlings pointed out again and again in the book (and in the series) that death isn’t always a tragedy. It’s sad for the living, but I wouldn’t say that Harry dying, really dying, and killing Voldemort in the process would be tragic (heroic more likely).
BTW, literary geeks aren’t turned on by either a classic tragedy or a classic hero’s journey; they’d probably salivate at no resolution ala black screen on the Sopranos.
Right that’s classic tragedies. Modern tragedies don’t bother with fatal flaws, they just kill the character, check out John Irving’s works he’s probably the master of the modern tragedy, his character pretty much die because it’s time to end the book. Where classic tragedies are about a life cycle and being consumed by your own flaws, modern tragedies tend to be primarily about death and the pointlessness it puts in life. In a modern tragedy all the struggles come to naught because the character dies anyway. This is, of course, why modern tragedies aren’t that popular, people don’t really want to read hundreds of pages of a book just to be told in the end that the entire exercise was pointless. And I think they’re popular with the literati crowd largely because they’re unpopular with the general populace, whatever the people are “too dumb to understand” will always find an audience with the literati.
I like the black screen of the Sopranos, I thought there was definite resolution, you just had to think about it. The resolution was the survive again, and in the end very little changes. The black screen to me was David Chase doing a Ferris Beuhler, telling us all to go home, the shows over.