Following Sartre’s “Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices” it’s easy to say that the Dark Lord “ made all the wrong choices" i.e. he could have been a Minister for Magic, an ingenious inventor or a celebrity, but chose, and therefor became, the most powerful Dark Wizard of all time. True, it is Tom Marvolo Riddle, and perhaps Riddle only, who is to blame for all his wrongdoings and for becoming Lord Voldemort, yet, as I have stated in the very beginning, the issue of responsibility is not the subject of this analysis.
What I want to deal with, is why Tom made these choices. I see him as a person who desires all the "wrong" things and is aware of that, let me quote Sartre "If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul." So this is Voldemort, or rather still Tom Marvolo Riddle, a lonely orphan who wants power and revenge and does everything to get it, to shape himself as he wants to be, to create himself. When he changed his name, when he killed for the first time, when he made the first horcrux, when he gathered his first minions, did he analyse his actions from the moral point of view? It is hard for me to believe that so intelligent a person would take action without examining it thoroughly. I also think that, during these examinations the problem of “good versus evil” must have appeared at least once, especially since in the Philosopher’s Stone we see his famous quote “there is no good and evil, only power and those to weak too seek it”. This brings me back to the problem of his desire to become the greatest wizard of all time and the fulfilment thereof. A young man who has never known love or friendship is rather unlikely to want them and all the more likely to want to be feared rather than respect, worshipped rather than loved. We know that he hated his childhood in the orphanage. Also being a poor “nobody” in the noble Slytherin House must have filled him with negative emotions. So was it possible for him to want a loving family and fluffy afternoons by the fireplace? I suppose so. Is it surprising that he didn’t want that? No, at least not to me. This is how I came to the problem of fate or maybe simply the issue of cause and effect.
I see Tom as a somehow tragic character, i.e. although he, unlike classic tragic characters, never tried to do the "right" thing, he was still doomed. Doomed not by fate and not to become the Dark Lord, but by his childhood, desires, fears, and to want to become Voldemort. This seems to be the contradiction of what I said before and, most of all, of the existentialist issue of freedom. You cannot write about the nonexistence of determinism in one paragraph, only to thrash it by proclaiming somebody a tragic character in the next one, right? This is why I have a problem with it and admit that using the word “doomed” might not have been my smartest choice ever, but I like the sound of the word and, contrary to anything I might have previously said, it seemed fitting. Fitting, because I am not trying to prove that it was Riddle’s fate to become the Dark Lord, but merely stating that, as he had never experienced any positive feelings, he might have been unable to feel happiness. Note the difference between “happiness” and “satisfaction”, the difference between Voldemort’s maniacal laughter and a bright smile.
So, what choices did he actually have? Could he dream about simple and cosy life? I don’t know. I have written two pages about it and still haven’t found the answer to the original question. Let me leave you with this dilemma and another quote by Sartre “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”.
