Jon Snow

Who is Jon Snow?

For most of the story Jon Snow is the bastard son of Eddard Stark, brought up at Winterfell beside Eddard's trueborn children and never quite one of them. He shares their home, their training and their loyalty, but not their name, and the series treats that gap as the defining fact of his early life. In Game of Thrones he is played by Kit Harington, and in the novels he is one of the central point-of-view characters, so readers spend a great deal of time inside his doubts.

What makes him the hero the story keeps returning to is not talent or birth but a stubborn sense of duty that costs him again and again. Jon does the honourable thing when it is unpopular, keeps faith with people others have written off, and accepts the consequences. The novels and the show both test whether that kind of honour can survive in a world that punishes it, and Jon is their longest experiment.

What does the Night's Watch make of him?

Jon joins the Night's Watch because it is one of the few places where a bastard's birth does not count against him, and the Wall turns out to be where he finds a purpose. In the novels the brothers of the Watch elect him Lord Commander, and the decisions he makes in that office divide the men he leads.

That division is fatal. Men of his own order turn on him and kill him, and in the show he is brought back from death by Melisandre, the red priestess who has been searching for a promised hero. The return sends him back into the wider war with an authority he did not have before, as the man who came back, and it ends his time as a brother of the Watch.

How does he become King in the North?

After the North is retaken from the Boltons, its lords proclaim Jon their king, choosing him for what he has done rather than whose son he is said to be. The title gives him the standing to treat with Daenerys Targaryen as an equal, and the war against the dead gives him a reason to set that pride aside, which he eventually does by joining his cause to hers.

It is a choice the North never fully forgives, and it is typical of the character. Jon consistently ranks the threat everyone shares above the politics everyone prefers, and the story rewards him with victories and punishes him with mistrust in about equal measure. On a dragon, Rhaegal, he becomes something no Stark has been, without ever wanting the power that goes with it.

What changes when he learns who his parents were?

In the show Jon learns that his mother was Lyanna Stark and his father Rhaegar Targaryen, that they were married, and that he was born Aegon Targaryen. On paper that makes him the rightful heir to the Iron Throne and Daenerys's nephew, and it turns the last season's alliance into a quiet rivalry he never asked for. The full answer, with the episodes that reveal it, is on the page about his parents.

For the character, the reveal mostly confirms what the story had already shown. Jon was raised to believe he had no claim to anything, and he built a life on deeds instead. Learning that he had the best claim of all changes his options but not his instincts: he still does not want the crown, and the people around him spend the final season arguing about a choice he has effectively already made.

Where does the series leave him?

Jon ends Game of Thrones where he began his adult life, with the Night's Watch, sent back to it as a punishment that both sides of a fragile peace can accept. He does not stay at its post. In the final episode he goes north of the Wall with the wildlings, the people he first learned to treat as more than enemies, and the series leaves him there.

Some viewers read that as exile and some as freedom, and the ambiguity seems deliberate. The man with the strongest claim to the throne walks away from the realm altogether, which fits a character who was always more comfortable among people who judged him by what he did. In the novels his story is unfinished as of the date this page was last checked.