Plot Holes and Contemplations:
Horcruxes, Souls, and Why Voldemort is an Evil Bastard
If you're anything like me, you're immediate reaction when J.K. Rowling introduced the subject of Horcruxes was something like this:
Blink. "Wait…what?" Blink.
Cue rant.
I mean, what? We can split our souls now, and it will let us live forever? I don't understand what splitting one's soul even means! What the hell's a soul and why is splitting it such a horrifying crime, above everything else Voldemort ever did? He was a Dark Lord! Surely he's done worse things?
I believe my biggest problem with the concept of Horcruxes is that, while I can give a very vague description of what a soul is and why it's important that we have one, to be honest, at the time I first read the series, I didn't really understand. A soul, while supposedly important, was something more of an ambiguous idea, and therefore, horcruxes ended up being an equally ambiguous concept.
However, then, one day, I read this quote:
"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
It took a while for the meaning of that phrase to really sink in and properly percolate in the back of my brain, but all of a sudden, several days later, I nearly gave my cat a heart attack when I jumped up out of nowhere, yelling, "I got it!", when I'd been reading quietly for the past three hours.
And truly, I did get it. I understood the true horror that Voldemort had done, the mutilation he had committed on himself of his own volition.
He had willingly fractured his very being.
It would be as if I took fundamental aspects of you, your morals, your beliefs, your personality, carved them out of you, put them in a box, and then refused to give them back, so that all you had left was a fraction of what had been you originally.
Of course, while I understood now why a Horcrux was an unbelievably despicable thing to make - for if Voldemort could do that to himself, would there even be a limit to what he'd willingly do to others - I still didn't understand why a horcrux would allow someone to be immortal. How would that even begin to work?
So I began to think. What was a horcrux (besides a perversion of nature and personal identity)? Based on Rowling's descriptions, a horcrux is an object that contains a part of someone's soul, storing it inside itself - a soul-jar, if you will.
Well, what does a jar do? It stores things to preserve them from contamination. What could contaminate a soul?
Death.
All of a sudden, the puzzle pieces began to fall into place for me. The disgust that the characters had for the idea of a horcrux, how a horcrux works, why Voldemort was able to live on despite his body turning to ash.
Horcruxes. Soul-jars. The ability to take and preserve yourself against the pull and contamination of death, by fracturing your soul and storing it in an object.
But what would the side-effects of cheating death by fracturing yourself end up being? For surely, there had to be some, as everything comes with a price, and the bigger the prize, the higher said price would have to be.
An analyses for another time, perhaps.