The Beatrice Letters theory

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

This is part 10 of the Strange Interpretation of Jean Lúcio from Brazil

To understand this thread, it is necessary to read my previous threads.


1 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35828/lemony-snickets-narration-culturally-different
2 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35834/lemony-dialogues-events

3 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35835/little-chronology-theory

4 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35843/daniel-handler-duplicates-events-confuse

5 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35845/great-hiatus-theory-enigma

6 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35847/letter-lemony-sent-real

7 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35850/beatrice-alive-years-after-house

8 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35854/explanation-secret-letter-tss

9 - asoue.proboards.com/thread/35855/final-theory-sugar-bowl

I think it's time to start explaining my interpretation of The Beatrice Letters. I really love TBL. There is no official Portuguese translation of TBL, but there are translations made by volunteers. The first team to translate was called "Unfortunately Society" in 2009, whom I really thank. The other translation was made by volunteer Isadora in 2013. Volunteer Isadora Bortoluzzi Massa did an annotated translation of TBL in her Course Conclusion Work from the Faculty of Portuguese-English Literature, at the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil. I wanted to highlight these facts to show how much Brazilian fans take ASOUE seriously.

To understand TBL, I believe you should start by reading the last letter.

Please note carefully the following excerpts from Lemony's letter to the editor on TBL.

 

“{…} Once inside the warehouse, one can only hope that is has been organized sensibly -- otherwise it may take all night just find the room in which documents from long-ago library exhibitions are stored, and all morning to find the proper file…

Finally, it occurred to me to look under the name of the poet… Because I love her so much, for instance, it never occurred to me that there could be more than one Beatrice Baudelaire. IT WAS QUITE SOME TIME BEFORE I RECEIVED THE FIRST OF BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS THAT I REALIZED THAT ALL OF BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS COULD BE FOUND NOT JUST IN THE FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE BUT IN THE SECOND BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE AND THAT PERHAPS IF I GATHERED THE REMAINING LETTERS OF FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE WITH THE FIRST LETTERS OF THE REMAINING BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE, THEN THE BEATRICE LETTERS COULD EXPLAIN THE BEATRICE LETTERS AND EVEN THE LETTERS OF BEATRICE, NO MATTER WHICH LETTERS THEY ARE, AND NO MATTER WHAT ORDER THE LETTERS ARE IN. I IMMEDIATELY BEGAN WORK ON THE FILE. 

And now, after all this time,  have found the same scrap of paper  had once examined in a glass case – and, years before that, examined in a hallway of the library, with the scrap of paper in the glass case. Sadly, this missing sonnet is like a missing sock – it had been lost for so long that everything else has completely unraveled in its absence. For many years I thought if I collected all these letters and their accompanying ephemera – a phrase witch here means “documents and items which I feared had vanished, and may soon vanish again” – I could put all of them in the proper order, as if solving an anagram by putting all of letters in the right order… The arrangement of letters could spell more than one thing…

This file is finished – just when I thought it might finish me… THE SECRETS CONTAINED HERE ARE LIKE ALL SECRETS – DANGEROUS TO THOSE WHO DISCOVER THEM AND HARMLESS TO THOSE WHO FAIL TO NOTICE THEM. For this reason, I recommend that you either destroy this file or make as many copies as possible… I DO NOT KNOW WHEN I WILL WRITE YOU AGAIN.”

 

 

Please, remember one of the premises of the Strange Interpretation of Jean Lúcio From Brazil. While the 13 books of ASOUE are directed by the Great Public of the universe of Lemony, the TBL is a file that contains personal letters. While there may be deliberate lies in the 13 books of ASOUE, there are no deliberate lies in TBL. However, there are indications of caution on the part of the authors of the letters in TBL. The letter senders are aware that the letter could be read by others than the recipient of the letter. So one of the letters contains a Sebald code. Thus, in a few letters, the sender does not want to deceive the recipient, but wants to deceive or confuse any other person who happens to have access to the letter. For example, in one of the letters the sender starts each paragraph as if writing a business letter. In addition, recipients of the letters know that it is possible for someone to try to cheat by letters. The recipients of the letters know that a person can send a letter pretending to be someone else. See this excerpt from BB to LS # 1,

“Perhaps you will also think I am someone else, and will make a suspicious note in the margin, accusing me of being some villainess or other.”

In this letter, the recipient (Lemony) made a note, indicating that at the time he read the letter for the first time, he believed that the true sender could be "E" (probably Esmé).

Now that you know all this, turn your attention back to the letter to the editor. From my point of view, in this letter Lemony states clearly that in the file that we call TBL, there are letters coming from both Beatrices. At the same time, Lemony makes it clear that by the time he was writing this letter to the editor, only one of the Beatrices was alive. He referred to Kit's daughter as "THE REMAINING BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE". This indicates that the "FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE" was dead when this letter was written. I need to believe that. My whole theory is based on the premise that Lemony would not lie in a personal letter. However, that does not mean that "FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE" had been died since fire of her house. Quite the opposite. Accepting as a fact that there are letters coming from the two Beatrices in the archive, and accepting the fact that Beatrice survived the fire at her house based on the evidence I've already presented, TBL makes a lot of sense.

What would be the method of distinguishing whether the letter comes from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings or Kit's daughter? Would comparing signatures be an appropriate method? No. As I explained on the Thread about the R letter, in Lemony's universe, signatures can be faked. Lemony did not believe that R's letter was even R's because there was her letter at the end of the letter. In addition, Lemony suspected that the letter From BB to LS # 1 could be from someone else, even seeing the signature of the letter. What could help distinguish from which Beatrice comes from each of the letters is just the content of the letters.

Now turn your attention to the letter BB to LS # 2. Here are some things that this letter has, and some things that this letter does not have.

The letter's sender wrote:

"I am leaving this city, only hours after finally seeing it for the first time, to follow your path of yarn and pins ... Without Violet, Klaus and Sunny, I am an orphan - an orphan who is leaving this letter here. .. PS This is a very handsome paperweight, by the way, although I can not tell if it is a snake, a worm, or an electric eel. "

This person is evidently Kit's daughter. She says she's never been on the City. She states that Baudelaire siblings are her parents. She states that she does not know what paperweight is, and anyone who has known Ike knows that paperweight is a leech. Now, what does this letter not have that is very common in several other letters from Beatrice to Lemony? This letter does not contain the anagrams "Baticeer" or "My Silence Knot".

Now let's look at the letter From BB to LS # 3.

See what this letter has and what this letter does not have. Note the sections below:

[...] the eldest shepherd said, ringing his cowbell to call to his flock, and looking me very carefully in the eye. I traded them a ring on my finger, emblazoned with the initial of someone I believe you once knew, for a yak ride to see the cave for myself. I don't know what i will have to trade in order to have this letter sent.  Your cave is a miserable place - drafty, bat infested, and decorated with hideous wallpaper… This has been a hard years journey. And now... all  have learned is what you said when you left this cave... "I'm in the mood for a root beer float", you said, and so am I. I will return to the city, where I've been told the best root beer floats can be found at certain shop, although I've forgotten the shop's name, location, and price list.”

The sender of this letter apparently does not know the Sebald code. The older pastor apparently tried to send him a message in Sebald's code, but she did not notice. Also, the sender of this letter does not know how to control bats. She saw several bats in the cave, and yet she had no idea of using one of them to send the letter to Lemony's office. In addition, Lemony evidently left a message that would be easily understood by the mother of the Baudelaire siblings. He said, "I'm in the mood for a root beer float." The first place the mother of the Baudelaire siblings would think about going would be at a specific cafe, where Lemony and Beatrice had their first meeting, the same place where they kept meeting for many years. In the letter From LS to BB # 3, Lemony makes a date with Beatrice in this cafe. He wrote:

"As you take your bow, drop one of your hatpins off the stage. That's your signal to me that it is safe to meet at the usual place for our midnight root beer floats."

So I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that this letter comes from Kit's daughter.

Now think: What does the letter From BB to LS # 3 not have that most of Beatrice's letters to Lemony have? Again, this letter does not contain the anagrams "Baticeer" or "My Silence Knot".

What is the origin of these anagrams? Who invented them, and what use did this person give to these anagrams? The answer to these questions is in the letter From LS to BB # 2

Lemony wrote:

"It's easy to write letters during Code Class ... The only other student I know in this class is O. who is nothing but annoyance. As I write this he is filling his notebook with anagrams of obscene words ... After the incident with the bottle of ink and the root beer float, I think it's better to spend my time inside "My Silence Knot" ... My sister has told me that there are bats to be found there, and I would love to spend some time with a certain "baticeer".

These anagrams were created by Lemony in a class that explained codes. Apparently it was a class that explained about the use of anagrams, because Olaf was writing anagrams in his notebook. Lemony went on to use anagrams in his letter to Beatrice. He used anagrams of his own name and the name of Beatrice. Beatrice understood that this was an excellent method for identifying herself in a letter. Whenever Beatrice sends a letter to the person she loves, Lemony, she writes the anagram of his name or her name or both. For this it is necessary to create an opportunity within the text of the letter to use the anagrams, even if this leaves the text with low naturalness. People who did not know the use of anagrams would never realize this method of identification. In addition, if Lemony found a letter without the anagrams My Silence Knot or Baticeer, Lemony would be certain that this letter would not come from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings. After all, why would someone use "My Silence Knot" in a letter? It is not a very common expression in English. What about the word "Baticeer"? This word does not even exist in English dictionaries.

Based on this, I can say that the letters From BB to LS # 1, # 4, # 5 and even # 6, come from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings.

Some of these passages make more sense when you come to that conclusion.

For example in BB to LS # 1:

"All I hope is the best, but hoping for the best, like hoping to obey your orders, almost always leads to disappointement ... There are many people, to affect all, with the same initials as you, just as THERE IS AT LEAST ONE OTHER PERSON WITH THE SAME INITIALS AS ME ... For years I kept quiet, feeling all my words twisting and tangling inside me like skeins of yarn, as I searched desperately for someone who could be of assistance. Now I must untie "My Silence Knot" and to a man I have ever seen ... I am hoping you wil tell me a story that began many years ago, in what I WAS TOLD IS A SORT OF CLASSROOM ... My name is Beatrice Baudelaire. I am searching for my family - Violet Baudelaire, Klaus Baudelaire, and Sunny Baudelaire ...”

From this letter I can say that the letter comes from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings. However, Beatrice chooses her words so that any reader other than Lemony and I, believe the letter comes from Kit's daughter. Beatrice is master in disguises. She is on a much higher level than Count Olaf. Beatrice's true interest is linked to Lemony's past. Her interest is in the passion they had together, and they could never live fully. Even the letter From BB to LS # 6, is from the mother of the Baudelaire siblings. She chose to use a phraseology very similar to that of Lemony's first letter. She apologized for embarrassing Lemony in front of his friends. When did this happen? She had ever embarrassed Lemony when she canceled the marriage. Read the letter below:

"Beatrice Baudelaire, Baticeer extraordinaire (The Rhetorical Building 14th Floor): I am sorry you embarrassed me in front of your friends. I just wanted to talk to you. The waiter agreed to bring this card with your drink. If you do not want to meet me, rip it in hald when you are done with your root beer float, and I will leave and snow try to contact you again. But if you want to meet me, I'm the ten-year-old girl at the cornner table. B."

Of course Beatrice was not 10 years old when she wrote this letter ... I believe the following two options: 1) Beatrice was disguised as a 10-year-old girl, and 2) Beatrice wanted to make Lemony remember the old days, when they were children and Lemony wrote her the first letter.

Now see the excerpts from the BB to LS # 5 letter:

"If you are in your office - and I hope you are, I can hear you below me pacing across your creaky wooden floor - you cold simply walk out the door, head down the corridor toward the east staircase, walk up one flight of stairs, head down to corridor, and knock on the door of the office directly above yours, you would find me here, sitting at my typewriter. But you will not. For one thing, you have a lousy sense of direction, and you might not know witch way is east. For another, you clearly do not talk to me. "

(Note: How would Kit's daughter know that Lemony has a bad sense of direction? She had never met her uncle before ... On the other hand, the mother of the Baudelaire siblings knew Lemony well. Lemony tried to draw a map for the cafe where they were supposed to meet, and he wrote that the West Gate was the East Gate, so this Beatrice knew Lemony had a bad sense of direction. This was something she had known since childhood).

"Violet told me once that I saved her life, and Klaus claimed that I had not died in despair not long ago the destruction of the Denoument Hotel. Even Sunny said she could not have survived without me. "

I know most fans interpret that young Beatrice would be here talking about the fact that she was born at an appropriate time, and so she saved the Baudelaire siblings.

But for me, due to the facts cited, I think this passage is referring to the fact that Beatrice and Bertrand created the hybrid apple that literally saved the life of the Baudelaire siblings after the destruction of the Hotel Denoument. This happen on the Island.

In addition, BB to LS # 4 may be better understood:

" I am writing to inquire further on the matter we discussed earlier this year. I'm Business Letter Writing Class, which is taught by a flat-footed man so sad an aunaware that I am certain he will give me an A on this assignement without reading anithing but the first setence of each paragrafph. I could say anithing here at all. For instance: A "baticeer" is a person who trains bats. I learned that in a poem I watched you read. ... The theree Baudelaires may be long gone, but there is a fourth Baudelaire here, waiting for tou to untie "My silence not" and help me find the end of a story that began with you -- in the very room where I sit now, about to hand this letter to my business letter writing instructor so he will grade it and mail it."

I know most fans believe that the young Beatrice watched Lemony, saw him reading a poem and then learned the name "Baticeer". But because of the evidence I have already presented, I believe that is not the case. I believe that the name Baticeer and the expression "My Silence Knot" was written here only as a code of recognition. It is interesting that "My Silence Knot" was written so the first letters of each word capitalized and between quotation marks. This gives a special emphasis to this expression.

There is another important detail. In the TBL file, there are letters from Lemony to Beatrice. How did Lemony get those letters back? I know there are theories that claim that Lemony made copies of the letters. However, it was apparently the letters themselves, in the original paper that was sent to the publisher. For example, in one of the letters, a note written by R. is written. This infers that the letter that was sent to the editor was the letter that was sent to Beatrice, not a copy. Another theory indicates that Lemony recovered the cards in the destroyed house of Beatrice. That is possible, but I think it is unlikely, because fires in general burn paper.

So my theory is that Violet's mother, Klaus and Sunny gave Lemony the letters she had kept with great affection. After meeting in the cafe, she handed him the letters to show Lemony that he was always thinking of him.

What do you think of this theory? When I reread The Beatrice Letters under this new look I got some interesting things.

[Foxy]

It would make sense for Beatrice to be much better at disguises than Count Olaf.

I never caught that detail about the west gate and the east gate.

How do you think Beatrice (the children's mother) actually died?

[Dante]

I don't see any inconsistency in the use of "East Gate" in LS to BB #1; they are departing through a gate, not entering through one. It is natural that whatever educational institution they happen to be in would, like most educational institutions, have secure fencing and gates, outside of which are the open streets of town; and so we see on Lemony's "map" that after exiting this gate then there are no routes proceeding to the left (the west), only to the right (the east).

[Hermes]

Beatrice probably knew that L had a bad sense of direction because she had read The Carnivorous Carnival, according to which the mountains are in the North, the East and the West.

[Uncle Algernon]

…So just to play Devil's advocate here… what if Asoueland is just surrounded by the mountains, in every direction?

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Mar 21, 2019 15:08:40 GMT -5 Dante said:

I don't see any inconsistency in the use of "East Gate" in LS to BB #1; they are departing through a gate, not entering through one. It is natural that whatever educational institution they happen to be in would, like most educational institutions, have secure fencing and gates, outside of which are the open streets of town; and so we see on Lemony's "map" that after exiting this gate then there are no routes proceeding to the left (the west), only to the right (the east).

I have to agree with Dante. I always imagined how the cafe was inside the institution, something like a school canteen.
But now I think the expression "outside the east gate" makes it clear that Dante is right.
Anyway, my point is still that it is more likely that Beatrice, mother of the "orphans" would know Lemony so well as to know about personal details about Lemony's life. Of course, this argument alone does not help me much. But putting all the arguments cited, it is reinforced.
Something I didn't write: the expression: "THERE IS AT LEAST ONE OTHER PERSON WITH THE SAME INITIALS AS ME ..." shows that Beatrice knew of the existence of one more person with her initials. If you add this to the fact that Lemony says there are letters from the two Beatrices, which have the same name, it is easy to conclude that the first Beatrice was alive for a long time after the fire in her house.

Mar 21, 2019 14:18:35 GMT -5 Foxy said:

How do you think Beatrice (the children's mother) actually died?

Foxy,

I made several hypotheses, some more bizarre than others.

The one I least like, and unfortunately is what I most believe, is based on the theory "Lemony schism"
 and on the theory that there are two sugar bowls. And also on the theory that the Sinicket Dossier reveals what really happened at Beatrice's house. And also on the theory that the real Lemony Snicket killed himself after writing TE, and another person went on to pretend to be Lemony Snicket between writing and publishing The End.
Briefly:
The Snicket dossier did not talk about Quigley's survival, but about Beatrice's survival. I think so because Olaf read most of the dossier and was still surprised to see Quigley alive. The Sincket dossier indicates there was a survivor. That's another way of saying there was a dead person in Beatrice's house. Jacques Snicket's motive to make sure that a person died is because he has found the charred body of only one person. This person was Bertrand. The neighbors said that the land on Beatrice's house was haunted. That's because they saw Beatrice coming out of the tunnel, completely alive, some time after the fire. The dossier showed 667 dark avennue because the tunnel connected Beatrice's house to Jerome's house. It was in this tunnel that Beatrice was hidden. So the fire was purposeful. The last verse of the poem My Silence Knot showed that one who dies one day would break the silence. This shows that Beatrice planned many years in advance to fake her own death and marry Lemony. So in the 200-page letter Beatrice made a point of making sure Lemony understood the poem, and that Lemony would continue to love her no matter what. Lemony finally discovered that Beatrice kiled Bertrand when she found the sugar bowl in the secret library. Beatrice set the hotel afire again, thinking that the sugar bowl was in the hotel itself. From there, Lemony stopped publishing ASOUE for many years. It was another Great Hiatus. Beatrice tried to meet Lemony, but Lemony did not want to meet her at all. Until Beatrice made her last attempt. Lemony agreed to talk to her. I think Lemony knew his duty if he met Beatrice. Lemony believed that evil must be exterminated. And just as he did with Hangfire, Lemony killed Beatrice. That was why he was so sure Beatrice was dead. And so he said that his love for Beatrice did not let him realize that there was more than one Beatrice. His love prevented him from seeing the cruel and sadistic nature of Beatrice. She even had fun killing Count Olaf's parents.  Her happyy family life had been just acting. After killing Beatrice, Lemony completed his work, sent it to his publisher, and asked some friend of him to take over his life. I think it was Daniel Handler, (because there is an UA character named Daniel Handler). After that, Lemony went to sea, invoked the great unknown using the whistle, and asked the Great Unknown to kill him. I think this is because of the poem at the beginning of Chapter 14 of The End. It's a poem about someone who wants to die. The passage is the penultimate extrofe of the poem. In the last extrofe of this poem, he talks about using the Great Unknown.

[jorgeane]

This theory of Beatrice's death is completely crazy.
However, I think you were right about the side of the gate. Pay attention to dashed lines.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Mar 24, 2019 9:15:33 GMT -5 jorgeane said:

This theory of Beatrice's death is completely crazy.

It is not a theory. It's a hypothesis. When I call it theory, it is because I can point out strong evidence. I wrote my hypothesis because Foxy asked about it. I still do not consider this hypothesis as part of "Strange Interpretation of Jean Lúcio from Brazil". And like I said, I have other assumptions about Beatrice's death. But perhaps you better understand this hypothesis when I write more about what I call Lemony's Schism, and about my interpretation of The End.

Mar 24, 2019 9:15:33 GMT -5 jorgeane said:

I think you were right about the side of the gate. Pay attention to dashed lines.

Yessss! Thank you! That was what was missing! You're right about the fact that I was right!

The dashed lines on Lemony's map indicate the path he would take with Beatrice to the cafe. In Lemony's mind he would meet Beatrice outside the east gate. So Lemony drew the dashed line on the left side of the solid line. He thought the outside of the east gate would be even farther east. But he confused east with west. If it were the way Dante explained it, and I had even agreed, the outside of the east gate would be the right of the solid line. In this case the dashed line would be to the right of the gate, ie to the right of the solid line. Lemony has a bad sense of direction, and Beatrice knew it from childhood.

[Dante]

I disagree that the alignment of the dashed lines is significant - or at least, significant in the way you're thinking of them. The solid lines on the diagram are likely to represent roads rather than walls, or Snicket and Beatrice would be unable to cross them; the given alignment of the dashed lines might instead represent which sidewalk they're taking, or more simply the practical reality that you can't overlay dashed guidelines on top of solid lines and still have them be visible. (The real reason they're there, of course, is to distract from the shape of the letter E.)

[jorgeane]

I think Lemony really confused the gates.This is according to what the young beatrice said about Lemony having a bad sense of direction.

but that's just one detail that does not prove anything.

Anyone observing Lemony could conclude that he has a bad sense of direction.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Mar 25, 2019 8:34:29 GMT -5 jorgeane said:

I think Lemony really confused the gates.This is according to what the young beatrice said about Lemony having a bad sense of direction.

but that's just one detail that does not prove anything.

Anyone observing Lemony could conclude that he has a bad sense of direction.

Jorgeane, I do not think you read my other threads. I suggest you do this. Thank you for your help. I would like to point out that this detail is the least important part of the theory. How would you answer the following questions?
1 - If all the letters of Beatrice are of the daughter of Kit, why Lemony affirms that there are letters of the two Beatrices in the file?
2 - If there are letters from the two Beatrices in the archive, which one is from the mother of the Baudelaire orphans?
3 - What is the purpose of the anagrams in the letters?
4 - Why are there letters from Beatrice without anagrmas and letters with anagrams?

[Dante]

Mar 26, 2019 18:33:45 GMT -5 Optimism is my Phil-osophy said:

Jorgeane, I do not think you read my other threads. I suggest you do this. Thank you for your help. I would like to point out that this detail is the least important part of the theory. How would you answer the following questions?
1 - If all the letters of Beatrice are of the daughter of Kit, why Lemony affirms that there are letters of the two Beatrices in the file?
2 - If there are letters from the two Beatrices in the archive, which one is from the mother of the Baudelaire orphans?
3 - What is the purpose of the anagrams in the letters?
4 - Why are there letters from Beatrice without anagrmas and letters with anagrams?

1. The book is leaning on an ambiguity in the English language in which the construction of "the Beatrice letters" or "the letters of Beatrice" can have two different meanings - letters to that person and letters from that person. The book adds an extra layer of ambiguity by making the to and the from be two different characters; and thus, the book involves the letters of two Beatrices. We'll see below how the inclusion of anagrams also plays on this ambiguity.

2. The premise of this question is invalid.

3. Lemony and the original Beatrice use anagrams to communicate private meaning relevant to the emotional connection between the two of them. The second Beatrice appropriates those anagrams either blind to their true meaning (e.g. calling herself a "baticeer" despite having no stated interest in training bats) or as an attempt to convince Lemony that a similar emotional connection should compel him to speak to her. (I'll discuss this further below.) The anagrams also serve as a clue, to reinforce the idea that the letters in the book are not in their proper order (i.e. half of them occur in a different chronological period to the other half), and to tie in with the overarching anagram puzzle of the book where a single special character hidden in each of the letters can be constructed into a message foreshadowing the plot of Book the Thirteenth (and I'll discuss this further below, too); it's unfortunate that the publishers misunderstood and made the significant letters too obvious by putting them in large punch-out card segments, demolishing the puzzle.

4. The only two letters from Beatrice which lack anagrams are in direct continuity with the letters from her which do have anagrams, and as such we are under no obligation to believe there is any significance to whether or not a letter uses anagrams, given that they allude to letters and anagrams regardless. Is it meaningful that some of Lemony's letters don't include anagrams while others do?

What I also want to mention, though, is a reason why it's important to the book for the letters from Beatrice, or if you prefer, to Lemony, are all from the younger character - and that's because Young Beatrice is also a metaphor for a fan of ASoUE. She's a child, writing letters to an author important to her, appropriating phrases and symbols from the author's work into her own personal symbolism despite lacking a connection to their origins, chasing after the author with questions and constructive criticism, essentially begging the author to keep on writing new books about what happened to the characters after the final volume. Undercut this, and you undercut the allegory.

But another thing that I think tends to be forgotten about TBL in recent years is the context in which it was published. It came out a month before The End, and so at that time we didn't know about Kit's daughter, we knew nothing about events taking place after the end of the series, and we couldn't anticipate a second Beatrice (barring a hint included in some promotional videos). What we were expecting was a book dedicated purely to the past and to Beatrice's history with Snicket; and on a surface level, that's what we got, but the book demands that we look deeper. The conceit of TBL is in presenting to you alternating letters between Lemony and Beatrice, and asking you to resolve the apparent contradictions in chronology between the two sets of letters - is this story set in the past, or the future? And as it turns out, it's both, because each set of letters is fully coherent internally once you take it separately from the other set. Insisting that any of the letters from Beatrice are actually from the first and original Beatrice is just a complicated way of falling for the book's tricks.

Anyone who has understood that the letters to Beatrice occur in a different chronological period and pertain to a different character than the letters from Beatrice has already solved the mystery.

[Optimism is my Phil-osophy]

Mar 27, 2019 8:37:17 GMT -5 Dante said:

Mar 26, 2019 18:33:45 GMT -5 Optimism is my Phil-osophy said:

2. The premise of this question is invalid.

I think not. Lemony wrote to his editor:

"IF I GATHERED THE REMAINING LETTERS OF FIRST BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE WITH THE FIRST LETTERS OF THE REMAINING BEATRICE BAUDELAIRE ... I IMMEDIATELY BEGAN WORK ON THE FILE"

"gather" means: to bring together; collect

"LETTERS OF SOME PERSON" means letters FROM someone, right?

look "of" definition: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of
"used as a function word to indicate origin or derivation"


In addition, in the first letter of Beatrice, where the anagram "My Silence Knot" already exists, Beatrice states that there is at least one other person who has the same initials as her. This is evidence that both Beatrice Baudelaires existed together for some time.


Regarding Lemony not to include these anagrams in some of his texts, I will explain in a next thread, about the poem "My Silence Knot".