Fairy Stories: Antithesis of The Opening Line

Something interesting has crossed my mind while reading Stardust this past week. My thought concerns the opening lines of many of the fantasy books I have read so far. While reflecting on these stories it come to my attention that a lot of these books tend to be the antithesis to their opening lines. What do I mean by that? well take a look through three of the books that I've read so far.

The first is of course the Hobbit.

"In the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a dirty, wet hole, filled with the end of worms and an oozy smell."

Looking at this we can see that the rest of the story is the exact opposite of this statement. We see Bilbo leaving his beloved home and getting into all sorts of dirty messy trouble; basically the antithesis of the starting line of the book. He is not in his home and his adventures are far from clean and civilized.

Secondly, look at the first line of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

The events that follow in literally every book in the series is completely and utterly the exact opposite of this statement. Harry is anything but "normal". In fact, he seems to defy normality with his very existence.

Lasty let's look at stardust.

"There once was a young man who wished to gain his heart's desire."

Now while this one is a little tricky, I still believe that in some ways this can be seen as an antithesis to the rest of the book. How so, you may ask? I think the fact that Thorn's desire ends up being very different to what he perceives it as, or at least it ends up very different in the end, shows us that the person he is stated to be in the opening line is very different than who he ends up being. That my line of thinking, maybe it makes sense, maybe it doesn't.

I guess this whole thing has really got me thinking that perhaps these authors are starting these books out with an intended basic thesis. Then possibly the rest of their writing is to defy that in some way or another. I of course do not see this as an intentional happening, but rather something that is in some way subconscious.