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Post by Dante on Sept 19, 2009 12:55:19 GMT -5
I wonder if the fridge still contains the pickle which Lemony left there. Perhaps in the end he was after all able to retrieve it. Given that he said he never retrieved the fanbelt either, while there is a suspiciously fanbelt-like object in the arboretum - well, if Snicket doesn't make these continuity nods in the text, I'm glad Helquist is in the illustrations. I shouldn't wonder; Helquist took it to an art form (er, as it were) in TPP. Oh, that's good. Hmm. I couldn't say for sure - perhaps... yes, I thought so! They're in stock at the Last Chance General Store. But alternatively, surely a wooden rocking horse must be a feature of any vague childhood memory. A less oblique reference would be simply to TVV - of all the many representations of crows in the town of V.F.D., that some should be carved strikes me as probable. Darn, now I have this memory of Hector whittling objects from wood, and I'm pretty sure he never did. I suppose it could be a nod to the straight reading of Genesis, even if that interpretation is rather inverted in The End. I'm not sure Handler is, for that matter. I suspect we'll never know for sure whether this was a nod to the site or a callback to TEE. We know Handler knows about the site, but I don't think we've ever identified any references to it. If we had, they'd be up there at the top of the site, I'm sure. I stand by this theory. I'm not sure Kit ever refers to the snake as the Incredibly Deadly Viper, so her dubbing of it as "Ink" may have a similar origin. Oh, that reminds me that I was going to suggest earlier ways in which Ink might have met Kit, but ultimately didn't. The U.A. suggests that the Viper's been packed off on the Prospero, so it is at least on the ocean. I guessed it, but I'm not sure at what point. It couldn't really have been anything else. |
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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 19, 2009 14:02:05 GMT -5
I don't have much for this chapter, because most of its been covered, but there are a few things I'd like to point out:
-Chapter 7-
For the longest time I thought the picture for this chapter was a leaf lost in a stream, however after futher examination I realized it was an apple core. So what's that stuff around it?
Klaus to me in this chapter gives the impression of being negitive and maybe a bit villianious- with reason. "We can't just worry about Kit, we need to worry about ourselves..." "We can't live here, Dicision Day is approaching..." ectera.
Klaus: "[Kit] couldn't have come far on a boat of paper" he's right about that. Then why didn't Ishmael see her coming in his periscope? At least I assume he didn't see her, since he did nothing about it.
Why does Olaf admit to trying to trick the Baudelaires? He probably could have gotton away with it, he is an actor. Or he tries to be.
And then Olaf reveals his knowledge of Ishmael to the Baudelaries, and his plan. (To threaten the islanders with the medusoid mycelium.) He also makes a tempting offer to tell the Baudelaries secrets of "things they'd never discover on their own" All on four pages! But I can't imagine Olaf sitting down voluntarily telling the Baudelaires, who he despises, all the secrets he knows.
"...and wonder if they dared learn what lay at teh heart of their sad lives, when every secret, every mystery, and every unfortunate event had been peeled away."
Which I'm pretty sure is a reference to the beginning of the book, when the Baudelarie's story is refered to as an onion.
Edit: I'll just put Chapter 8 too, as it's been pointed out, the first chapters aren't very packed with information.
-Chapter 8-
"'Of course' Kit murmered 'I should have known I'd be here. Eventually, everything washes up on these shores.'" So she knows where she is by the measly description: "We're on a coastal shelf... there's an island nearby... safe"
"Why, the day before I met you, Baudelarires,..." So I'm going to assume this means the day before she drove them off in her taxi, and not when they began being 'watched' which was who knows when.
"I need someplace safe" Kit says. So she heard of the island before its reputation of it being "safe from the treachery of the world" Which again helps determine the time of Ishmael's arrival.
"A schism," Kit said quietly. "Gesundheit" Erewhon replies. So Erewhon doesn't know what a schism is?
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Post by Dante on Sept 19, 2009 15:33:46 GMT -5
For the longest time I thought the picture for this chapter was a leaf lost in a stream, however after futher examination I realized it was an apple core. So what's that stuff around it? Water; it's the apple core while it's in the puddle. So you weren't that far off with your first guess. Ishmael seems to use his periscope to watch the skies, so I assume it's not specific enough, or aimed in the right direction, to see floating book-cubes on the sea. Or alternatively, he did notice it but couldn't get there before the Baudelaires. Checking it, it's as if he's slightly disappointed that they weren't certain he was tricking them. He seems to expect that they'd know better. However, it seems like he does know the information he promised - he does know that the Baudelaire parents were once on the island... I wonder if he learnt that from Monday, too. If they offered to be his henchmen for real, he might. The sorts of secrets Olaf can tell them would destroy them. Hmm. It suddenly strikes me as odd that Olaf, of all people, should know what's going down on the island, but Kit, who's an ally of the Baudelaire parents and who we can state with some degree of certainty met them after their time on the island (opera incident), does not. Even after chatting with Thursday. Actually, wait, since she goes on to say she'd heard there'd been a schism, perhaps her tired mind was getting confused and thinking only on the good things she'd heard, forgetting the bad. I guess not. "A schism" does sound a bit like an "atishoo!" sneezing onomatopoeia. |
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Post by Hermes on Sept 19, 2009 16:00:44 GMT -5
Hmm. I couldn't say for sure - perhaps... yes, I thought so! They're in stock at the Last Chance General Store. But alternatively, surely a wooden rocking horse must be a feature of any vague childhood memory. True - but given most of the things here are specific references, I hoped there was a definite source for it - so thanks for finding that. Yes, but it's meant to be something that was not part of the Baudelaires' story - which is indeed odd, since black birds certainly are. I think in an interview somewhere he refers to the Yom Kippur fast, so he must be observant to some extent. But then, so might the Baudelaires be - just not totally. Well, it's clearly a callback to TEE, but it might be a nod to us as well - why does he choose that number? "'Of course' Kit murmered 'I should have known I'd be here. Eventually, everything washes up on these shores.'" So she knows where she is by the measly description: "We're on a coastal shelf... there's an island nearby... safe" Yes, she is jumping to conclusions a bit - there are other islands; later one of the other characters mentions one. But if everything washes up on those shores, I suppose she was expecting it to happen sooner or later. I think by 'someplace safe' she just means on dry land rather than out on the coastal shelf - and hasn't the island always had a reputation for being safe? But we do know when Ishmael arrived; when he tells his story it fixes it fairly precisely. Yes, I'm a bit surprised that all the characters seem to find 'schism' a terribly difficult word. In any case it shows that Erewhon wasn't in VFD, I suppose. |
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Post by Dante on Sept 20, 2009 4:24:30 GMT -5
I got a lot more than usual from this chapter, but it's mostly thematic.
~Chapter Six~
I probably don’t need to remark on how this chapter highlights the shattering of the standard series formula… although it hasn’t actually been the series formula since TVV. So, The End really does return to the start, huh. In that case, perhaps I should suggest that The End is also about memory, and accumulation. It is filled with references to previous books – items, quotations, structure… in other words, this is a book which can only exist because of the other books which came before it.
Root beer floats are associated (albeit indirectly) with broken hearts. Useful for TBL.
“Certainly the Baudelaires themselves, who as far as I know have not read their own sad history…” So at the time of writing this part, the Baudelaires haven’t read aSoUE, or at least Lemony doesn’t know that they have (and just perhaps thinks it unlikely). That may be useful for determining how and when the series was written.
Ah. Regarding Olaf’s particular insanity in the first chapter, and his equally ridiculous disguise now, perhaps it’s appropriate that nobody takes him seriously here? Friday doesn’t treat him as anything remotely like a threat, and seems to regard him as an annoyance – she asks the Baudelaires only if he’s been “bothering” them. That’s also new – Olaf’s disguises are treated as being exactly as silly as they really are. Hmm. Given that the islanders are effectively products of a literary process in a way that the characters of earlier books weren’t so much, perhaps they have a heightened awareness to this sort of fictionality?
Olaf describes Kit as “fairly innocent” – perhaps compare to “unspeakably innocent” and “relatively innocent” in TPP? Although Olaf probably knows quite well that Kit can’t be entirely innocent.
Is it interesting that Rabbi Bligh, a Jewish preacher, employs a reference to Muhammad?
“He reached behind him and revealed the harpoon gun” – where has he been keeping it? Tucked into the back of his dress? This feels rather cartoonish, a character reaching behind their back and deploying a terrible weapon from “hammerspace.” I wonder if that’s part of the deconstruction of Olaf here. I remember commenting before that the harpoon gun itself is a sign of cartoonishness, because in a more serious series it would just be a normal gun.
Olaf’s disguise philosophy is interesting – if he stopped pretending, he’d suddenly become a lot more dangerous. So, in a way his disguises are protecting people from himself. Can we get more from that? Other than some generic social commentary on the idea of the persona, anyway.
It’s also interesting that Olaf is so open here. There are moments when he drops his disguise in earlier books, but that’s usually to threaten the Baudelaires; here Olaf drops his disguise to complain about how dejected he is. Perhaps that’s why the disguise is necessary; he can’t bring himself to be open about himself to the other islanders, so he needs a disguise to be able to relate to them properly.
Olaf proffering the harpoon gun to the Baudelaires also feels significant; it’s partly a highlighted callback to TPP, of course, but it also feels a bit like another Edenic dilemma – a choice between knowledge and ignorance, or rather experience and innocence, or rather power and weakness. Olaf in this book is the tempter – although it’s only to the Baudelaires, since he never reaches “Eden” himself. The Baudelaires, as I think I suggested earlier, are the serpents who actually reach Eden itself, holding dangerous knowledge and memories.
I wonder if it’s also important that Olaf asks for some of the coconut cordial, but is refused. Doping him up with the cordial would probably be one of the best ways to neutralise him in this situation – but on the other hand, I suspect that if Olaf were accepted onto the island as an equal, if that had been the plot of The End, he would have gradually stopped drinking it, like a psychiatric patient who conceals the drugs they should’ve been taking and whose insanity then grows. Uh, anyway, time to construe a lame and prosaic reading of this scenario: That Olaf wants the cordial but is refused it shows that he wants to be a part of the island society but that his treachery resists dilution. Unlike the Medusoid Mycelium
The size of the Incredibly Deadly Viper is incredibly inconsistent. How can it be “as thick as a sewer pipe” if Friday’s been hiding it in her pocket?
Hmm. It strikes me that the U.A. shuttling the Incredibly Deadly Viper out to sea – if only subtly – shows that Handler probably knew back then that he was going to have a Genesis allegory in the final book. As I mentioned before, he claims he always knew how the series would end, and I think the island was a part of that, as was the baby.
Hmm. Olaf seems disturbed by the re-emergence of the snake. Disturbed by memory? I’m sorry to go on about this, but so much of this chapter reads as if it’s hiding very important statements and messages. “…it was as if Olaf no longer had clutches” – like a snake that’s been defanged. Just as the Incredibly Deadly Viper has a dangerous name but is really harmless, perhaps the same is true is Olaf.
“The world is a wicked place.” He says it “quietly,” too. This reads like an admission. It also comes right on top of Friday’s expression of optimism about the world. The End has two competing views – there’s the view expressed by Friday here, that the world must be a wonderful place and we shouldn’t miss a bit of it. Then there’s Olaf’s view, that the world is a wicked place and full of wicked people. Friday’s young and doesn’t know better; she’s always lived far away, protected from the world. Olaf has the strength of experience and a lifetime of wickedness. One of The End’s big themes is parenthood – the island and Ishmael are like a home, like parents, keeping their “children” safe from all the treachery of the world, but it’s unnatural that someday those children wouldn’t set out and see for themselves what the world is like. What position does Olaf occupy in that allegory? I guess he’s what every parent fears; the ambiguous threat looming over your child as soon as you let it out of sight. Which is true of the whole series.
Interesting, isn’t it, that Weyden and Ms. Marlow, the ones appointed to shove Olaf in the birdcage, are both female? Perhaps it’s an appeal to Olaf’s chivalrous instincts, although gender-wise it’s also an inversion of Olaf shutting Sunny in a bird-cage, just as this whole scenario is an inversion of that incident, another mirror of TBB. But Olaf in a cage is more powerful than Sunny in a cage.
This illustration of Olaf in a cage, wearing the flame-imitating dress, is printed in the lyrics booklet that comes with The Tragic Treasury, which was released a couple of days before The End. Now that’s what a spoiler should be – a giveaway which you don’t have the slightest hope of understanding.
“…and these children are the real villains.” The Baudelaires do actually prove far more disruptive to the island society than Olaf.
“She’s my girlfriend.” Good point, whoever asked whether Olaf was speaking as one disguised or in his genuine identity here. If he’s disguised, then that wouldn’t make a lot of sense, since he’s disguised as Kit Snicket, so let’s take it as a claim from his genuine identity – this probably constitutes foreshadowing.
“…I think you should abandon this Kit Snicket person, too, even though I’ve never heard of her.” And nobody’s told Ishmael that she’s Kit Snicket, so he’s obviously not only heard of her but recognised her too.
Both Count Olaf and Klaus at points in this chapter say “This isn’t fair.” Olaf caps Klaus’s declaration off with another depressing truth: “Life isn’t fair.” This is just like his claim that “The world is a wicked place.” The Baudelaires don’t want to admit these things, even to themselves, but they can’t help but agree.
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Post by Hermes on Sept 20, 2009 11:38:21 GMT -5
Root beer floats are associated (albeit indirectly) with broken hearts. Useful for TBL. Ha, yes. I should have spotted this TBL link. I'm not sure it helps that much, actually. It follows from two things that are fairly clear; most of the series has been published by now; and Lemony does not know that the Baudelaires are dead. It's true that if we accept the dating of the series suggested by TUA and by bits of TSS (but not others), according to which the series was published while the unfortunate events were still going on, there might have been an opportunity for the Baudelaires to read it; but it doesn't follow that they did. I'm sure saving the snake while Olaf gets all the others shows that something was planned. As to its being at sea - if that's meant to lead to its being washed up on the island, it would seem to mean that the Prospero has been wrecked, which is rather disturbing. Not sure - no one had said she was Kit Snicket in I's presence, the Baudelaires had said who she was before he was summoned, so the summoners may have told him about her. Come to think of it,. that might be a Princess Bride reference. Not a very noticeable one, though, as Morgenstern/Goldman certainly didn't invent the phrase. Chapter 10. This is of course the place where the 'you can't know everything' theme becomes really central, though if you look back in the light of this it's been foreshadowed for some time. The girl with one ear - the description is the same as that of Jospehine's mother-in-law, i.e. Ike's mother. Can she be the same person? Since she was presumably also Gregor's mother, and he was very old, which makes her even older and Ishmael, her teacher, older still, I rather doubt it; it is, once again, a parallel rather than the same story. Of course, this passage is full of parallels (though some of the stories may be connected as well - e.g. it seems unlikely that two completely unrelated businesses used the name 'Lucky Smells', so perhaps the lumbermill was built on the site of the melon farm). The Prospero, then known as the Pericles - another Shakepearean name, of course (and I think that that play also involves voyages, shipwrecks and whatever). 'I had an idea that an antidote might be hidden - ' and Sunny interrupts. This is later regretted. While what I is saying is indeed tangential to the immediate issue at hand, it may still be significant for the story as a whole. I suspect that Ishmael was going to say '- in a sugar bowl'. The next thing he mentions is tea as bitter as wormwood. This might mean either than tea may be bitter as wormwood because it contains an antidote (concealed in a sugar bowl) or that tea may be as bitter as wormwood because people have no sugar, as they are using their sugar bowls to conceal antidotes. Certainly later Klaus seems to suggest a connection between horseradish, wormwood and sugar bowls. Again, this is a parallel - the poison I's student was taking was not medusoid mycelium, and the antidote she needed was not horseradish. And while this may explain why sugar bowls are important to VFD (as we know from TUA), it does not explain the special significance of the sugar bowl. It just points to a more complex story of which the sugar bowl is a part. 'we want to know what's going on here on this island at this very moment, not what happened in a classroom many years ago'. Irony here, of course; there is another story, important to the Baudelaires, which began in a classroom many years ago, the story told in TBL. 'a waiter in a lakeside town' - Larry in Lake Lachrymose? 'a certain bathyscaphe' - the one whose sinking Lemony caused? Or, again, parallels. Note that in the conflict between Ishmael and the Baudelaire parents Ishmael was in a way right; they wanted the island to be a safe place, but also to have contact with the outside world; and you can't do that; all the safe places have, after all, been destroyed. But I goes wrong in thinking that you can isolate yourself completely from the world. This also has implications for the way the Baudelaires brought up their children; they tried to shelter their children from the treachery of the world - in a way that they, like the Snickets etc, had apparently not been sheltered - and it did not work; the children found themselves alone and unprotected. But on the other hand they do - judging from TSS - seem to have ensured that their chidren, even though not actually recruited, had volunteer skills that they could use if need be. The story of the ring - this has mutiple significance. As well as making Ishmael's point about sheltering, it is finally a more or less explicit identification of the Baudelaires' mother with Beatrice - absolutely clearly if you have read TBL and already know part of the story of the ring, but pretty clearly even if you haven't, I think. Also, the box in which the ring was kept parallels the box in which Lemony keeps his map - presumably Jacques also had a similar box, but we don't know what was in it. |
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Post by Dante on Sept 21, 2009 4:34:31 GMT -5
~Chapter Seven~
This chapter is just one long conversation between the Baudelaires and Olaf, with nobody else on-screen (except an unconscious Kit, and perhaps the Viper). That makes it extremely compelling, even surprisingly so, and almost unique.
“…the way most classrooms have at least one child who is quite unpopular, or most secret organizations have at least one rhetorical analyst who is under suspicion.” The latter is fairly plainly relevant, but the former may well link to TBL as well. I doubt Lemony was the only person who disliked Olaf.
“I have a plan… Let me out and I’ll tell you what it is.” This is the crux of the chapter: The debate the Baudelaires have with Olaf, but also largely with themselves, over whether to let Olaf out. Or, if you like: Is it ever the right thing to do to unleash wickedness and pain upon the world? It’s a Serpentine dilemma, and this is the real temptation for the Baudelaires, the decision between right and wrong. It also requires them to reassess Count Olaf as a person; to look at him in a more complex and nuanced fashion rather than regarding him as the ultimate evil. I think there’s also a degree to which Olaf’s “plan” is more of a plan of the world – the wicked world-view I’ve mentioned before now. Do the Baudelaires let Olaf out, and find out what kind of world he thinks they live in? Or do they try and form their own “plan”? Right now they haven’t even a compass.
Olaf locked in the cage is described as being like he was in one of his disguises. He’s fragmented; we can only see a few features, and those are: His yellow-and-orange dress, a few toes and fingers, the “wet curve” of his mouth, and one blinking eye. This feels like a breakdown of Olaf; the fire, the grasping hands, the V.F.D. insignia, the… uh, mouth which lets forth subtle words?
Regarding the feeling in this thread that Olaf no longer cares about his own life: That seems to be true here. He says “But you’ll drown as surely as I will” awfully nonchalantly, and while he’s obviously trying to beguile the Baudelaires, he’s staying very cool.
“Everything eventually washes up on these shores, to be judged by that idiot in the robe. Do you think you’re the first Baudelaires to find yourselves here?” This strikes me as more obviously Biblical than on previous readings, if we take the island as a kind of afterlife, and Ishmael as God again – and indeed, the Baudelaire orphans aren’t the first Baudelaires to have crossed over into the afterlife. You can’t really represent the island too thoroughly as an afterlife, though, as the Baudelaire parents were there in their own younger days, and returned to the world. Everyone else who visits the island either dies, or “moves on” into an ambiguous netherworld. The thought that Ishmael also “judged” the older Baudelaires too is significant foreshadowing.
“Of course I’m trying to trick you! ... That’s the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everybody runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else.” Olaf’s being very honest here, and it strikes me that he’s being almost didactic – teaching the Baudelaires lessons about the world that their parents never did, lessons which otherwise, funnily enough, they could probably only have learnt from books. It’s also an awfully banal description of the world, it strikes me. Perhaps that’s why Olaf feels so at ease in his villainy; he doesn’t seem to take anything he’s done seriously. This is true in the rest of the series, too; it’s all rather like a joke to him.
“Nowhere in the world is safe.” If we take the Hotel Denouement as the last safe place, then one way in which this statement is true is that it’s been destroyed (inaccessible catalogues aside). But of course the hotel itself was never very safe. The Baudelaire mansion was a safe haven for the Baudelaires in the first years of their lives, but look at it now.
“I’m no worse than anyone else.” I think it’s both cynical and untrue for Olaf to say this; however, I think that he probably really believes it. It’s one way for him to justify his crimes to himself – and in addition, look at the crimes committed against him: His own parents were murdered by the “good guys.” If Olaf believes he’s no worse than anyone else, he has no incentive to change his ways. The volunteers, on the other hand, still commit wicked deeds now and then, but they feel shame.
“What is your plan?” So as a consequence of Olaf’s evil whisperings and temptations, the Baudelaires have already made one concession. They’re willing to listen to Olaf now – to hear his plan. Letting him out isn’t something they’re so sure about yet, but they’re edging there. They’re being pushed like a raft of books over a coastal shelf. Any “plan” they were beginning to form has been defeated by the realisation that Ishmael, the one in charge, isn’t a good person and so cannot be reasoned with. That means the only option left for the Baudelaires is to hear Olaf out.
““I’m not really pregnant,” he confessed with a caged grin.” BIG SHOCKER
“Her siblings gasped, and even the Incredibly Deadly Viper looked astonished in its reptilian way as the villain told them what you may have already guessed.” I like that Lemony acknowledges our powers of prediction here; of course, we have an advantage over the Baudelaires, and that’s that we know this is a book. We know the Medusoid Mycelium is going to turn up again.
“Yomhashoah” – “Never again.” I’m not an expert on Hebrew, but “shoah” is the Jewish term for the Holocaust. (Looking it up on Wikipedia, I see that “ha’shoah” is the Latinisation of the Hebrew letters.)
“That little girl hasn’t been here long… so she still believes Ishmael lets people do whatever they want. Don’t be as dumb as she is, orphans.” There have been a couple of mentions before now that some people think Olaf has respect for the Baudelaires in this chapter? I think that “Don’t be as dumb as she is, orphans” shows that… that Olaf doesn’t exactly have respect for the orphans, but that he expects better of them. After everything they’ve seen, they should know better.
“Do you think your pathetic history is the only story in the world? Do you think this island has just sat here in the sea, waiting for you to wash up on its shores? Do you think I just sat in my home in the city, waiting for you miserable orphans to stumble into my path?” This is something of a postmodern acknowledgement from Olaf. Standard narrative fare would be for all these assumptions to be true; for the island and Olaf to have existed for no purpose except for the Baudelaires to one day come across them. Olaf tells the Baudelaires the world is bigger than that. They aren’t so special after all. The world goes on without them, and more importantly, there’s more to other people than just what the Baudelaires have seen of them. I think Olaf is also coming to a realisation in this chapter that the Baudelaires may have read a lot of books, but they’re still very naïve.
I won’t repeat my comments on Olaf’s temptation of the Baudelaires with stories, except to say that he’s like a caged tiger. As I said, he is at his most sinister here, possibly his most sinister in the whole series. The Baudelaires realise that the harm he can do them isn’t just physical. If you want to look at it that way, he’s already harmed their souls; because they met Olaf, the Baudelaires have committed crimes and have so many regrets. Letting Olaf out and hearing the secrets he has to tell them will corrupt them entirely. Physically they’ll be unscarred, but mentally? They’ll have lost the innocence they’re just barely managing to cling onto. And the thing is, it is very, very tempting. The secrets Olaf knows are exactly the ones the reader has been looking for for books and books now. We buy things like the U.A. and TBL to try and discover those secrets which the Baudelaires could never discover on their own. In that sense, as readers, we’ve already fallen into Olaf’s trap; we’ve opened the door of his cage, and if we could, we would keep on opening it, again and again, until there was nothing left to learn.
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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 21, 2009 15:19:01 GMT -5
I think he does that for the Baudelaries benefit- he's more convincing that way.
Then could the same be said for the Quagmire mansion?
I always thought Olaf justified his crimes by thinking of the crimes of others; except he thinks of them as a whole- not as individual wickedness.
But hadn't he commented that again and again on how the Baudelaires were complete failures and they would get absolutly nowhere in the world?
Which, now that I think of it, is a good buisness tactic.
That's why the Baudelaires got the part of the stars of the books. They make a more intresting story.
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Post by cwm on Sept 21, 2009 15:23:16 GMT -5
What should have been written:
"I'm not really pregnant," he confessed with a caged grin.
DUN, DUN, DUN DUN DUN DUN *
Chapter Nine
The hair ribbon here matches the one Olaf uses to frame Violet in TVV. Also, another explanation of Violet's hair ribbon's purpose - is this one of the instances where The End quotes directly from TBB?
'Olivia Caliban' - this is enough for the drones who edit the ASoUE Wikipedia pages to assume that this is the same Olivia from TCC, apparently.
Chapter Ten
A demonstration of how the Baudelaires' story isn't the only story... something until now has been hinted at in Lemony's narration and TUA, but I think this is the first real indication of just how complex and sprawling the universe of ASoUE is - not just the Baudelaires matter. Even if most of these are just blind alleys which Handler never really planned.
Ripe cantalopue. "Aren't melons smashing?" If you got that, you may award yourself five hundred trillion nerd points.
Chapter Eleven
The chapter picture gives away the end-of-chapter climax, where the final harpoon is finally released. More on this later.
Olaf's appearances in this book are quite weird. In some books he's either not in it until quite late on, like TMM or TGG, or here's in it right from the beginning and is a constant factor from thereon, like TBB or TRR... the point being that once Olaf appears, he stays a major physical presence. Here he seems somewhat sporadic, disappearing for chapters, returning again... another example of The End breaking the mould.
What is Olaf's plan here? Getting wounded by the harpoon gun - I suppose it could be reasonably assumed that the diving helmet would get the worst of it. But breaking it open when he's the closest person to the Medusoid Mycelium at the time? Is this a kamikaze mission - his last act is to rip the Island apart?
Ishmael comes across quite thick here. Even if he doesn't know that Olaf has the Medusoid Mycelium, surely he'd get suspicious when Olaf doesn't do anything to avoid getting shot? And how much good is murdering someone, no matter how villainous, in front of the colony going to do his efforts to regain control?
Chapter Twelve
Ishmael stabs the Baudelaires in the front here, really. Like Paul Merton (sorry Dante).
"We were told the same thing when we were served tea right before our trial" - slip-up, Klaus actually said it to Frank/Ernest or Ernest/Frank. I suppose he could have forgotten with the stress of his current predicament.
"in a vess-" -el for Dissacharides? It seems unlikely given what's said in TPP, unless of course there are multiple sugar bowls... I won't run through that theory just now 'cause I'm lazy.
Chapter Thirteen
"The islanders are in worse shape than Kit" - and you know this without having seen her, Klaus? Gosh.
"from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert" - this might have been a neat moment to recall some other books, but I guess not.
"It contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling" - I think it was a mistake to include this line, honestly. It takes the punch out of Kit and Olaf's deaths somewhat, since the book has already told you it's coming. That's like a big caption coming up saying "S/HE'S ABOUT TO DIE" a few minutes before Gisborne runs Marian though/the starliner explodes with Adric still on board/Snape kills Dumbledore/Catherine gives birth. Delete according to what you've seen and can therefore compare with (from left to right.
Olaf's final scene is extremely powerful nonetheless, though. One of my favourite moments from the series.
*(it's the EastEnders theme tune)
I thank you for this reread, my friends.
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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 21, 2009 15:51:59 GMT -5
But... how is that possible to think? Wasn't Olivia's death the only one the Baudelaires actually witnessed?
He can't put that much faith in the islanders aim?
Except he'd have, like, not five seconds to decide that from the time he'd fired.
I don't think he was trying to get control... I'm pretty sure he'd given up on that. I think his real plan, like you said, is to destroy the island.
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Post by cwm on Sept 22, 2009 1:53:31 GMT -5
I was referring to Ishmael offing Olaf, not vice-versa.
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Post by Dante on Sept 22, 2009 4:53:47 GMT -5
Then could the same be said for the Quagmire mansion? Yeah, why not. They haven't been safe since they lost their home; Prufrock Prep. was unable to prevent Duncan and Isadora's kidnap, and Quigley had to become a lonely wanderer. Their temporary guardians didn't do anything like as good a job as their lost parents, who after all took good care of them for a good twelve or thirteen years. That's probably debateable. There's also a degree to which Olaf can just put moral thoughts out of his mind by saying things like "It's a wicked world." The effect is the same - if he's the average, he's got no incentive to change, and doesn't have to think badly of himself. Yes, but he seems oddly frustrated by how dense the Baudelaires are here. He can tell them that they'll get nowhere in this world, but they've defeated his plans and escaped his clutches again and again. There is a defining instance later on, though, that I'll look at more closely. The hair ribbon here matches the one Olaf uses to frame Violet in TVV. Also, another explanation of Violet's hair ribbon's purpose - is this one of the instances where The End quotes directly from TBB? I think so, yes. There's probably a list of all the quoted sentences somewhere. Actually, I know I've got one somewhere; I'll post it if anyone's interested. The possibility exists, and yet, so does the possibility that they are different individuals. It'd be one of the very rare occasions when a character's previously unknown surname is revealed, though. There's probably something important about the way he keeps on popping up in a new role every now and then. At the start he is himself; in his second appearance he's in disguise and is imprisoned; in his third appearance he's escaped capture... Hm. Olaf's a lot more... well, in this book he's very passive. He tries to be active, but he spends most of his time staying in the same place, and barely achieves anything. The Baudelaires are a bit like that in this book, too, but not very. Perhaps it's an aspect of the role-reversal - Olaf is now not only powerless, but not even that important. I haven't reread the chapter yet, but I didn't get the impression that Olaf was going out of his way to get shot. I doubt that he even cared, though, as I think I recall him laughing manically afterwards. Olaf thinks that there's always an escape route somewhere, a way out of every situation. So maybe he wasn't worried too much about being attacked. Again, I haven't reread that far yet, but wasn't it more about personal revenge than regaining control? Once again, I'll cover my "vess" theory when I get to that chapter. But I think this can be explained quite happily without confusing the sugar bowl issue. I agree. It's all very well signposting ahead of time that Uncle Monty's going to die, because we'd probably already guessed that. We know that this isn't the cheerful series for cheerful people and I doubt anybody thought the series was going to end happily after two books. But this is the last book, and these are important, lasting characters. It's not really fair to give it away; even if we can guess it's going to happen, we have to have some doubt for it to remain exciting. But... how is that possible to think? Wasn't Olivia's death the only one the Baudelaires actually witnessed? The postcard would have been written over fifteen years ago, so it doesn't matter that Olivia's dead. ~Chapter Eight~ The illustration, at least, depicts only two people, suggesting Helquist read it that way. This was another chapter illustration printed in The Tragic Treasury, although our interpretations of it then were far more interesting than what it turned out to be. “…and Captain Widdershins’s submarine that lay under the sea…” Another thing the Baudelaires don’t know – they last left the submarine above the waves, on Briny Beach. “…and the mysterious schism that lay under everything like an enormous question mark.” I’d missed this reference to the Question Mark until now. I think this establishes both the Question Mark and the schism as having underworld-like qualities. “Thursday did say that the colony had suffered a schism” – and yet the Baudelaire parents never mentioned it to her? Considering that they were once the island’s facilitators, and thus would’ve been quite likely to reminisce about its mechanical wonders etc., it strikes me as surprising that the topic has apparently never come up between them and Kit. But then again, I guess this is all just a plot device to hide the Baudelaire parents’ role in the backstory. “the fire the children had set in the hotel’s laundry room,” “the harpoon that the three siblings had fired into his heart” – lies, lies, lies. “Not now, not yet, and perhaps not ever.” This also gives us an explanation for why the Baudelaire parents might never have told their children about V.F.D., and the same for the Baudelaire children and Beatrice. It’s too painful for all sides. Both the Baudelaires and Kit are keeping secrets here – the Baudelaires are hiding the knowledge of what happened to Dewey from Kit, and Kit’s hiding the knowledge of what happened to the Quagmires from the Baudelaires. Reading carefully, it’s probably possible to guess from Kit’s twitchy behaviour and the Baudelaires’ own omissions that the Quagmires are in deep trouble. “In the dim light of the flashlight [Finn] looked even younger than she was.” Huh. This strikes me as being an important statement, but I’m not sure why. Is it in some way metaphorical? Or is it a clue about the character? How do you secretly teach someone to yodel in such a small geographic area? But then again, one may as well ask where Madame Nordoff gets the batteries, or what Finn even uses the flashlight for. Ishmael’s objections to certain swimming strokes seems awfully puritan. “He and I stood together in a time of great struggle, and we’re still very good friends.” This would seem to establish Thursday as – well, the sort of character who should appear in more backstory fanfiction. For an off-screen character who didn’t exist before this book, he seems strangely important. The sequence when the flashlight is turned off is important. That the Hotel Denouement was an architectural sketch even at the time that the city was just a collection of dirt huts strikes me as improbable, but perhaps it’s been a very long time in the planning indeed; also, historical time, in addition to narrative time, seems somewhat confused in aSoUE, so it may not have been that long ago that the city was just a handful of dirt huts – less than the centuries one might expect. “…and the faraway island had a name, and was not considered very faraway at all…” I should state that I don’t think the island has a name we can work out. I also wonder how the island could have ever been considered to have not been far away, given how difficult it is to reach. But then again, this may pertain to antique beliefs about the afterlife, say, rather than about geography. I agree that the reference to the niece is suggestive of Lemony and the younger Beatrice, although I find it unlikely that it literally refers to them. Although it could. I wonder how strong the parallels in the island schism are to the V.F.D. schism? Was that a case, too, where there was a rallying figure, and it was unclear who supported them until the tensions were finally brought out into the open? Actually, the Building Committee version of events suggests this to me, but the reinvention of the schism in TPP means that that interpretation is no longer possible. “Injured and pregnant.” “And distraught.” Description elevated to the status of running joke. Kit was described twice in TPP as being “distraught and pregnant.” “Even the baby should be able to cook something up.” Sunny’s not a baby, but I find it interesting that Erewhon accidentally hit on Sunny’s talent in this metaphor. “..to the desperate voyages of the Quagmire triplets, who at that very moment were in circumstances just as dark although quite a bit damper than the Baudelaires’…” A bit of a problematic statement, since it implies various things about the Quagmires. The fact is that if the Quagmires and their circumstances are described suggests that they are alive, which would seem to invalidate one interpretation of the Great Unknown; on the other hand, if they are in dark and damp circumstances, their being dead would also satisfy these conditions. If the Great Unknown is a positive force, a submarine say, then – well, this is some time now, at least a day, after the Quagmires were sucked up by the Great Unknown, so why is it still dark and damp? It might be better if this line had not been written. |
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Post by Hermes on Sept 22, 2009 7:26:01 GMT -5
OK, must catch up before the reread runs away from me. Dante, this is fascinating. There's a lot her that needs to be pondered. If I tend to concentrate on continuity stuff, it's not because I think the thematic stuff is unimportant, just because I often can't quite find the words for it. You can’t really represent the island too thoroughly as an afterlife, though, as the Baudelaire parents were there in their own younger days, and returned to the world. Everyone else who visits the island either dies, or “moves on” into an ambiguous netherworld. Not sure - who have you in mind here? The Baudelaires disappear from view when they leave, true, but Beatrice returned to the world, so apparently did Monday and Thursday, and Lemony himself if, as seems likely, he visited the island. Yom ha Shoah = Day of the Holocaust, i.e the memorial day. Hmm. But isn't this what Ishmael would say? Not knowing is also a temptation - the temptation to shelter oneself from the treachery of the world. Are we meant to be looking for a middle way? And did the Baudelaire parents perhaps find it? (It occurs to me that the Lemony's constant exhortations to people not to read his books may be relevant here - he may be afraid of more than causing them distress. His avoidance of Beatrice - if he did avoid her - and come to think of it his strangely ambiguous attitide to her is a bit like his attitude to his readers - might be explained in the same way.) 'Olivia Caliban' - this is enough for the drones who edit the ASoUE Wikipedia pages to assume that this is the same Olivia from TCC, apparently. While I agree that they shouldn't presume, it seems likely - how many Olivias do you expect there to be? (Olivia, by the way, is another Shakespearean name, from Twelfth Night, another play about shipwrecks.) The laughter certainly suggests it. I think there are certainly multiple sugar bowls, in line with TUA, where it seems VFD regularly uses sugar bowls for some mysterious purpose - possibly, in the light of TE, concealing antidotes. This does not conflict with there being one specially important SB which is the subject of the quest in previous books. The islanders are dying of medusoid mycelium. There's no reason at this point to think Kit is - she is out on the coastal shelf, not near where the mycelium was released - and she has not yet gone into labour. It seems a fair guess to me. . But, but, but - it doesn't tell you whose sibling. It's a massive tease. (If we have been reading very carefully we ought to know that the Baudelaires don't die right now; but it isn't obvious.) Wot, no chapter 14? “Thursday did say that the colony had suffered a schism” – and yet the Baudelaire parents never mentioned it to her? Considering that they were once the island’s facilitators, and thus would’ve been quite likely to reminisce about its mechanical wonders etc., it strikes me as surprising that the topic has apparently never come up between them and Kit. But then again, I guess this is all just a plot device to hide the Baudelaire parents’ role in the backstory. And they did tell her about the bitter apples. Might she be deliberately not mentioning them, so as not to distress the Baudelaires further? Though of course they do tell Kit in the end. They wash up on the shores, of course. And frontstory too, perhaps. He's presumably still alive. 'Difficult to reach' need not imply 'far away'; it may be difficult to reach because of ocean currents or the like. It is certainly quite near Anwhistle Aquatics. The sense I get from this passage, though, is that its farawayness is to some extent a deliberately cultivated myth. It seems quite likely that the sinister duo played that role. (And if the building committee marks a sub-schism in VFD, that could also be a parallel.) |
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Post by cwm on Sept 22, 2009 10:56:05 GMT -5
But it does inform us that two characters will die - Olaf particularly. That takes the punch out of their actual deaths even if we weren't explicity told who.
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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 22, 2009 18:26:48 GMT -5
-Chapter 9-
The arboretum items have already been discussed, so I'll skip ahead to:
"...I never imagined the arboretum would hold so many things" I began to doubt the Baudelaire's imagination capabilities here, I thought they would at least have got a little picture of the amount of items in the arboretum after hearing a hundred times: "Everything washes up on these shores at one time or another".
Violet: "Think of what I could build here... splint's for Kit's feet, a boat to take us off the island, a filtration system so we could drink fresh water...I could invent anything and everything" My thought here was that she speaks as though it's only a small possibility, and that she only thinks of the immediate circumstance.
"...he kept Count Olaf away, even if he is a little cruel." Is Klaus referring to Ishmael, or Olaf? "It appears to know where it's going." Violet says. How can she tell a snake knows what it's doing? "Maybe it's been here before." Which is a realistic possibility. Not been there before during the course of that week- but before the Baudelaires even showed up. When the Baudelaires follow Ink into the tree... aren't they afraid they'll be led into a snake nest, or something of the sort? "This is an enormous periscope, much bigger than the one in the Queequeg. Could this be a reference to another submarine washed ashore?
...(see page 667) Ah, the irony. Violet: "Ishmael said he never heard of Kit Snicket, but here he writes she's a figure of the shadowy past." Does this tell you anything about Ishmael, Baudelaires...? "...as if it were as curious as the Baudelaires orphans to know who had written those words so long ago." Is this a metaphor with Lemony being Ink?
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