A Series of Unfortunate Events

Available from Amazon.ca here!

Author: Lemony Snicket (alive - and a pseudonym)
Genre: Children's Literature
Difficulty: 1 - ReallyEasy.

A short review of the series I wrote for an assignment. titled Bathos and the Baudelaires:

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.” This was my introduction to the miserable world of three orphaned children who meet with more misfortune and pain in a single book than all the children’s books I ever read put together. It is, of course, the opening sentence of The Bad Beginning, book the First of Lemony’s Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (New York: Harpercollins, 1999), a popular children’s series that recently concluded with the thirteenth installment. And the series certainly lives up to the expectation set in the opening pages. Klaus, Violet, and Sunny Baudelaire discover that their parents have perished in a fire, along with all their belongings and worldly goods, and they are carted off to live with a sinister uncle, Count Olaf, who is only interested in the fortune that the orphans are set to inherit.

And it doesn’t stop there – the three orphans are subjected to all kinds of depressing situations and nefarious plots. Every good thing that crosses their path, whether it’s a kindly uncle or a friendly pair of triplets (who also happen to be orphans and have lost their younger sibling in the process) is taken from them. The situations that the three children are placed in seem impossibly hopeless, absurd, and inescapably discouraging, and by the end of each book they are not at all better off than where they began. It reads a bit like the French existentialists Satre and Camus for children, in a way.

So it is surprising to discover how popular the books are, not just among children, but among adults as well. What is so popular about a book that promotes such a dismal view of suffering and misfortune? Is it in fact nothing more than simply a gratuitous attraction to vicarious experience, something along the lines of the currently cultural addiction to reality television? I do not think so; in fact, I think quite the opposite. The Snicket books, while seemingly obsessed with misfortune, actually give us a frame of reference for coping with suffering in the form of a heavy use of bathos.

‘Bathos’ as defined by Merriam and Webster is as follows: “the sudden appearance of the commonplace in otherwise elevated matter or style.” An example, taken from the back cover of The Bad Beginning should be a helpful explanation: “In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast.” It is the last part, the “cold porridge for breakfast” that is bathos, the sudden appearance of the ordinary and quite comic in the midst of a list of otherwise unfortunate elements (including the itchy clothing). The Snicket books are full of this kind of comedy, treating cold porridge as if it were on the same level as a repulsive villain trying to steal your fortune.

We might be tempted to dismiss bathos as nothing more than a gruesome sense of humor, but the fact of the matter is that for some reason, it works. The presence of bathos confronts use with the ordinary nature of suffering and misfortune, in a culture that tends to hyperbolize the unfortunate. The truth is that we do not want to think of suffering as ordinary, as the rule rather than the exception. We take potent medications, or adopt addictive behaviors as ways to avoide the recognition of the misfortune that permeates our lives, because we don’t know how to handle it.

Lemony Snicket diffuses the fear of misfortune for us through a little humor. And he allows that humor to illustrate a very striking point – the acknowledgement of misfortune does not inevitably lead to depression and isolation. Rather, the Baudelaire children find strength in each other, to work through and against the suffering that is to a large extent imposed upon them. The humour is cathartic, not escapist; it frees us to recognize the ordinary nature of our lives. We all deal with fortune and misfortune, and we are not alone in the ordinariness of our suffering. Instead of the idealist vision of general and perfect happiness for all, Snicket presents us with a reality that is much more like what we actually experience; that misfortune is ordinary, for surely all of us would find a cold bowl of porridge at least a little unpleasant.