Mr. Snicket's Mock-Gothic Caricature (A Phrase Which Here Means 'Imitative Parody') : Part I
The problem with Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is just that--it is a series of the hyperbolically bad things that happen to the hapless Baudelaire orphans. Characterised by dark humour, an overbearingly didactic narrator, and conventions of gothic and romantic literature, the story of the Baudelaires--Violet, Klaus, and Sunny—begins when their world literally goes up in flames. Their parents and their mansion perish in an all-consuming fire, leaving them without any close family. Violet, who will receive the Baudelaire inheritance when she is of age, is a resourceful girl with a genius for inventing. Klaus is the middle child, a studious boy whose passion is learning and reading. Finally we have baby Sunny, whose main preoccupations are biting and babbling.
Mr. Poe, the Baudelaires’ distant banker, gives custody of the Baudelaires to distant relative Count Olaf. Olaf is depicted as a tall, thin man with one long eyebrow and a tattoo of an eye on his ankle. He quickly proves to be a greedy, cruel would-be actor who is only after the substantial Baudelaire fortune and would commit grievous acts to get it. His freakish associates include a man with hooks for hands, a severely androgynous person, and women with white-powdered faces. Upon their arrival at his filthy house, Olaf makes the orphans sleep on the floor, clean and cook, and run his errands. From there on, things get worse. At the end of each book, Olaf is exposed and the children are sent to live with someone better (supposedly). Yet no matter where they end up, Olaf finds them. Without the aid of Mr. Poe or other family, how will the Baudelaires survive Olaf's murderous plots?
ASOUE is steeped in references to terror, mystery, and romance. The lives of the Baudelaire orphans, which "are very different from most people's lives, with the main difference being the amount of unhappiness, horror, and despair," (The Miserable Mill), are chronicled by Lemony Snicket, a writer who has himself suffered at the hands of some questionable individuals. Gothicism permeates ASOUE with its language; Snicket's recurrent use of adjectives such as "dreadful", "miserable", "terrible", and so on, is echoed by the alliterative names of places and individuals that populate the story, and the titles of the books. For example, one of the Baudelaires' guardians hides from Olaf in Curdled Cave, only to be thrown into the leech-infested waters of Lake Lachrymose (named after fictional lake explorer Ivan Lachrymose). Another of Snicket's foibles is his incessant admonitions to his readers that the story will upset them. "[P] eople who hate stories in which terrible things happen to small children should put this book down immediately," he says. This quirk is repeated at www.lemonysnicket.com as well as the books’ blurbs and is reminiscent of the sensationalism of gothic literatures and pulp fiction.
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