Understanding Lord Voldemort.

Everything I am writing is purely my opinion and having read Harry Potter a million times (really a million times, it is almost sad), I am amazed by how I tend to ask myself new questions each time and how I seem to always find something I haven’t thought about before.

While reading Half-Blood Prince, specifically the part where Dumbledore tries to explain to Harry about Lord Voldemort’s past, and a little bit of why he did what he did, I was also curious about this — Was he a bad person by birth? Do people become who they are as they are born or is it the circumstances that make people who they are. Are they right or wrong? Who is to tell what is right and what is wrong? In the end, is it all simply subjective?

These are a few excerpts from the book,

“Those whom I could persuade to talk told me that Riddle was obsessed with his parentage. This is understandable, of course; he had grown up in an orphanage and naturally wished to know how he came to be there. It seems that he searched in vain for some trace of Tom Riddle Senior on the shields in the trophy room, on the lists of prefects in the old school records, even in the books of wizarding history. Finally, he was forced to accept that his father had never set foot in Hogwarts. I believe that it was then that he dropped the name forever, assumed the identity of Lord Voldemort, and began…