A Year of Unfortunate Events — Part the Thirteenth: The End

Not pictured: the Baudelaires' boss sunglasses.

So, I've spent the last year re-reading Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

You read other things, too.

I did. But you know, this was a project, like that time I read one chapter of Journey to the West everyday for one hundred days.

That must have been before the blog.

It was before the blog.

So, is this where we're putting the SPOILER warning for this month?

Well, I don't know that I'll be recounting the plot of this one.

What?

Yeah, I thought we could have a brief discussion of

Book the Thirteenth: The End

And then sort of wrap up this little project in a somewhat less lengthy fashion.

You're the blogger. So, what did you remember about The End before you re-read it?

Alright, so we start right back up with the Baudelaires and Olaf as they sail away following the events of The Penultimate Peril. Long story short, they're shipwrecked on a desert island. Somehow Kit Snicket gets shipwrecked there as well. Kit has her baby, a girl, and dies holding hands with Count Olaf, who also dies. The fact that these two people can acknowledge each other as complex individuals whose lives can't be summed up by words like "noble" or "wicked" serves to underline the series theme that people are more than just their worst or best deeds. Meanwhile, the Baudelaires begin raising Kit's daughter, who they've named Beatrice, and once she's one year old, they sail off in the repaired boat, which they've also named Beatrice. The end.

And how accurate is that recollection?

So. . . I definitely forgot a lot of this book. Like the plot. I mean, pretty much everything I remembered happened, but I left out the part about Olaf and the Baudelaires washing up on a island with a utopian colony run by a sinister facilitator named Ishmael (who'd really prefer to be called "Ish"), and peopled with characters named for famous writers and characters associated with stories of being shipwrecked, marooned, or involved in mutiny. And how the Baudelaires' arrival reveals simmering tensions that ultimately lead to a conflict between Olaf and Ish that ends with Ishmael shooting the villain with a harpoon gun. Which happens to unleash the Medusoid Mycelium.

So . . . everyone dies?

No. I turns out that the Baudelaires are saved by an apple-horseradish hybrid developed by their parents. Unfortunately, they can't convince the other islanders to eat the apple, but the Incredibly Deadly Viper may have saved them by smuggling an apple to their outrigger canoe.

The Incredibly Deadly Viper shows up again?

Yeah, he was on the raft that Kit Snicket built out of books. His name's Ink.

Anything else you're holding back?

The Baudelaire's parents left behind a book called A Series of Unfortunate Events, which—

You just finished reading, I get it.

No, it's actually a journal passed down by people living on the island that serves as a catalog of the world's treachery. The Baudelaires add to it while they live on the island with Beatrice, who they named for their mother (the selfsame Beatrice for whom Lemony Snicket carries an unrequited torch). Anyway, A Series of Unfortunate Events is very much the work of one Lemony Snicket, aka Daniel Handler, and this final entry is actually a good deal more touching than I remembered.

So . . . no more synopsis?

Look, we're at the last entry, and the synopses have been taking up too much space of late as the story gets more convoluted. Let's just talk about the book and its place in the series.

You're the blogger.

Heck yeah, I am! So The End is good.

That's it? It's good?

I mean, it works in the context of the series. It doesn't wrap up all the mysteries (that's something thematic that we'll be coming back to), but it does bring their conflict with Count Olaf to an end and begins a new chapter in their lives.

As adoptive teen parents?

As adoptive teen parents. But that also ties in the series' themes. I mean, it's a long book series, but what might we identify as the core moral messages?

Arson is bad?

Try harder.

Well, I mean, you've been going on about moral ambiguity for the last few entries.

I have. And the Baudelaires often find themselves performing acts that they might have previously judged to be wicked in order to protect themselves or others. In fact, the climax of the previous book finds them both literally and figuratively adrift after they fail to navigate a moral quandary.

The point being?

The point being that the real world can be complicated. You may have noticed a trend (especially in the later books) of the Baudelaires being stymied by dogmatic thinking.

For example?

The unusual educational strategies at Prufrock Prep. The excessive rules of the Village of Fowl Devotees. Esmé Squalor's obsession with what's in. The Volunteers Fighting Disease's distaste for the news,. Olivia's insistence on giving people what they want, regardless of the consequences. The Snow Scouts' absurdly long oath. Captain Widdershins' action-oriented philosophy. Ishmael's obsession with order over . . . I was gonna say happiness or fulfillment, but really over anything. And I think that might actually be the upshot to the frequent insistence that being well-read makes someone more likely to be trustworthy.

I mean, that's still a little fishy.

I agree, but I think the lesson is meant to be that exposing yourself to as many ideas as possible means that you're less philosophically inflexible. Which isn't always true. But then again, the point is that the Baudelaire's keep running into all of these people who take aphorisms like "Justice is blind," or, "He—"

Or she!

Aye, "or she who hesitates is lost," or "It takes a village to raise a child," or "No news is good news," or "Give people what they want," so mind-numbingly literally that they lose all sense of moral perspective and find themselves either carrying out or complying with unspeakable acts of violence or neglect.

That's not really so ambiguous.

It's not. But the point still stands that most moral dilemmas aren't so clear-cut that you can decide them with a one-sentence motto.

What about"If I reads, it ledes?"

Well, I did say most. But yeah, so while I've been sitting around arguing with myself about whether or the Baudelaire's actions are morally ambiguous, Snicket (or Handler) has sneakily placed another moral in plain sight.

That being?

It's actually an extension of the first: people are more than the sum of their actions. For example, while Olaf remains a dastardly and cartoonish villain throughout, the revelation that his parents were killed by Bertrand and Beatrice Baudelaire with poison darts and that he shares a tender moment with Kit Snicket before they die does give the impression that there was more to him than just greed and pyromania. But more impressively, it does this without trying to redeem him. He may be more than his worst actions, but that isn't enough for him to suddenly not be a terrible person. Likewise, the fact that the Baudelaires' parents had secrets and did a bunch of cloak-and-dagger stuff during the VFD schism didn't make them less caring parents to their children,. It just makes them more complicated figures.

Yeah, okay. . . but what was in the sugar bowl? And none of that shrug emoji bullshit.

Okay. I neither know nor care. And that's a good excuse to transition to another thing I like about this ending. Last time I read this book, back in . . . let me Google that . . .2006, I was annoyed that Snicket didn't really reveal what happened to all of the Baudelaires' allies (I mean, he strongly implied that Justice Strauss dies, since, you know, she's on the roof of a collapsing, burning building), but in The End, Kit reveals that she was with Captain Widdershins, Fiona, Fernald, Hector, and the reunited Quagmire triplets when their submarine came across that mysterious question mark that they spotted on the radar in The Grim Grotto, and that while she made a raft of books and ran away, the rest of the crew stayed to face the Great Unknown.

Oh god, that's so on-the-nose that you must fuckin' love it.

I fuckin' love it. I mean, yeah, it's a super obvious metaphor for facing whatever the future has to throw at you, but it's a kids' book, and I think that it's a good message for kids. Sometimes you have to stand up and face unforeseen circumstances. This is reinforced both by the revelation that the Baudelaires' parents left the island while pregnant with Violet in the face of an uncertain future, and by the Baudelaires' similar decision to leave the island with Beatrice at the end of the book (cleverly labelled as a single chapter Book Fourteen at the end of this book).

So is that everything you wanted to say?

No, but I think I've said everything that I think is important. As unsatisfied as I was with The End back in 2006, re-reading it, I can't help but see it as a fitting ending. Look, I've talked a lot about how burnt-out I've been on this series for the last few entries, but honestly, the ending was worth it. So, let's just wrap up with my monthly link to the Gothic Archies' song for this book, which—for the record—slaps.

Links:

Here is the aforementioned "Shipwrecked." It slaps.

And for fun  here are the bonus tracks from The Tragic Treasury: "Walking My Gargoyle" and "We Are the Gothic Archies"

So. . . do you wanna talk about any of the stuff you didn't address in any of the other posts?

Like what?

 Like the books' unchallenged assumption that the Baudelaires deserve to inherit a vast fortune by birth.

Well, I mean, there are also a number of places where it could be read as a critical of Capitalist assumptions. For example, the way that Sir exploits the workers at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill, or the vacuity of Esmé Squalor, or the spoiled brats at Prufrock, or the fact that Count Olaf is attempting to enrich himself by exploiting others (particularly the Baudelaires and Quagmires).  Also, Count Olaf wants to murder the Baudelaires. But yeah, I guess that a story about three orphans where the stakes are that they might not get to enjoy their fabulous wealth is a little tone deaf.

And what about the adaptions?

The movie's . . . fine. I watched the first episode of the Netflix show but I couldn't get into it.

That's it?

That's it, don't expect an Oddaptations or anything like that about this one. Wait, why are we still talking about the books? I ended the blog post. Look out for my next big reading project next month.