Ana Hening Kusuma Werdarini. C0308018. 2014. The Analysis of Voldemort’s Personality Growth in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Undergraduate Thesis. English Department of Faculty of Letters and Fine Arts. Sebelas Maret University. This research is conducted to analyze Voldemort’s personality growth in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Voldemort of Harry Potter series has been a very popular character among its readers as an antagonist who goes against Harry Potter, the protagonist. Characters in book, like Voldemort, are one of the important elements in literary works. Characters in book are built as if their existences are real although obviously they are just inside the book’s fictional universe. However, these characters are still like real people that are created by the author to have certain personality growth which can be seen from their characterization. Talking about personality growth, the psychological aspects of the characters cannot be neglected. Therefore, through Voldemort’s character, this research aims at describing Voldemort’s personality growth. The approach employed in the research is Psychological Approach. Meanwhile, the descriptive qualitative research is used as the method in this research. The primary sources of the data in this research is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince while the secondary data sources are books, articles, and journals that have relation with the research. Therefore, the data are in the form of utterances or quotes. Adler’s Individual Psychological theory is used in the research. It employs that everyone has been influenced by inferiority feeling to strive for either success or superiority. Those who strive for success can be considered as psychologically healthy people and the unhealthy ones tend to strive for superiority. The result shows that Rowling has described Voldemort’s characteristics as a boy whose traits are good looking, smart, self-sufficient, ambitious and hard worker. However, Rowling also has told that Voldemort is cruel. These characteristics have helped Voldemort to strive for superiority that he wants to conquer the wizarding community and wants to be immortal. It makes him to be considered as a psychologically unhealthy one. Rowling also shows the readers the definite reasons that lay behind Voldemort’s striving for superiority that is his compensation towards the inferiority feeling of being a half-blood as a low class in the wizarding community and towards death. However, Voldemort never once consciously realizes that his striving for superiority is not right. It strengthens that Voldemort is psychologically unhealthy person.

Rowling has indirectly taught her readers through the character of Voldemort to consider the fact that everyone in this world deserves to be loved and if someone fails to be loved, he tends to develop unhealthy personality growth. Thus, this research helps her in delivering the role of Voldemort in the series better. This research can bring benefit for students, readers, and other researchers who are interested in observing certain characters in literary works, especially by using Psychological Approach. Keywords: Half-blood, Voldemort, Personality Growth, Psychological Approach