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Post by lsandthebooks on Sept 25, 2016 8:22:48 GMT -5
I was reading on here and people say it was reported that he died right before Violet was born, which is why the Baud parents wanted to name her Lemony in The End. But the obituary in The Daily Punctilio, from the Unauthorized Biography, says that he died after writing at least some of the Asoue books, after he was fired from the Daily Punctilio, after his engagement was ruined with Beatrice, and after the Daily Punctilio reported his crimes....so what could this be?
What do people mean when they say he was reported to have died before Violet's birth? Like what details don't I have?
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Post by Dante on Sept 25, 2016 9:23:40 GMT -5
It comes from the fact that Bertrand and Beatrice considered naming Violet "Lemony" if she had been a boy, in accordance with their family naming tradition, a decision they could only have anticipated if they believed Lemony to be dead at the time. It has also been proposed, credibly, that Lemony has been reported dead on multiple occasions.
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Post by lsandthebooks on Sept 25, 2016 11:42:14 GMT -5
But where has that been mentioned I'm asking? like what page did I miss that mentioned he was reported dead other times?
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Post by Dante on Sept 25, 2016 14:00:21 GMT -5
The books themselves don't explicitly say that Lemony's been reported dead multiple times, but it's a theory that holds water. Although I think there is a bit where he talks about reports of one's death happening frequently... Yes, here it is. Chapter Fourteen, page 10: "There are others who say that they perished at sea, although rumors of one's death crop up so often, and are so often revealed to be untrue."
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Post by lsandthebooks on Sept 25, 2016 16:09:33 GMT -5
I've been wondering about that...do you think that Olaf and Kit really died? Like I saw the chapter in UA that's called Are the Baudelaire Parents Really Dead? And it's so ambiguous.
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Post by Dante on Sept 25, 2016 16:24:19 GMT -5
At the risk of being unduly comical, if Kit and Olaf weren't dead before the Baudelaires buried them, then I dare say they were afterwards. The U.A. chapter titles are pretty much all big, obvious questions about ASoUE which are exactly the sorts of things the readers wanted answering... and then they were just crossed out and replaced with something else, so it's a sort of joke.
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Post by Hermes on Sept 25, 2016 16:50:16 GMT -5
Yes indeed. Bear in mind that TUA came out between books 8 and 9, when we were puzzling over the idea of a 'survivor of the fire', making it seriously uncertain whether the Baudelaire parents were dead. It also seems that the orphans wanted their parents to be alive, and Lemony wanted Beatrice to be alive, leading to self-deception. But it tuned out, it seems, that the survivor was in fact Quigley.
By the end of the series, despite the continuing air of mystery, many questions have been answered - the orphans accept in the course of The End that their parents are dead. Since O and K die on screen, and, as Dante says, are buried, I don't think there has to be any doubt there.
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Post by lsandthebooks on Sept 25, 2016 18:06:00 GMT -5
I meant that the author might like to mess with his readers. To have boat pic and then have the secret code be Beatrice Sank from TBL...and then in UA when R. mentions the pics that showed Kit and her together as kids, and how the first pic is fake but everyone believed it...the first pic is a girl with a doll sitting next to her! LOL I'm saying the author may like to mess with people. Or canon wise, LS may have killed off the characters to protect their identities. He's still alive himself after 'dying' after all. I was asking you guys if you thought there was a metaphor or any hints that those 2 may still be alive.
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Post by lorelai on Sept 25, 2016 20:01:04 GMT -5
The thing about deaths in ASOUE is that if they're real, they get confirmed by Lemony in the narration. He tells us Kit will die early in The End, and same with Monty in TRR. The exposition and circumstances of a wound to the chest and fire plus an unstable building, seal Dewey and the person of indeterminate gender's fates. He gives us Olaf's death straight out, and while I'm sure he'd love for Kit to not be dead, I can't think of a reason why he'd protect Olaf in the way you're suggesting. In contrast, and to give you a cool reading if you haven't come across it yet, the theory about Josephine being alive, can hold up, because we never get told directly by Lemony or the Baudelaires if she drowned. In fact, since one of them comments that she's a strong swimmer, and passages in The Grim Grotto about a woman could be interpretted as Josephine (someone on here even theorized that because Widdershins mentions Curdled Cave in TGG, Josephine may have hiddan there because she knew the submarine would be able to help them all leave, but was too afraid to bring this up to the Baudelaires), the books encourage this idea, if you want to use it.
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Post by gliquey on Sept 26, 2016 11:45:09 GMT -5
It has also been proposed, credibly, that Lemony has been reported dead on multiple occasions. This is what I believe to be the case. The reports don't necessarily have to be as substantial as obituaries in a major newspaper either - they could be rumours circulating V.F.D. which the Baudelaire parents happened to believe. There is definitely not a scarcity of rumours surrounding Lemony, with arson and false accusations of criminal activity also following him around. Yes indeed. Bear in mind that TUA came out between books 8 and 9, when we were puzzling over the idea of a 'survivor of the fire', making it seriously uncertain whether the Baudelaire parents were dead. It also seems that the orphans wanted their parents to be alive, and Lemony wanted Beatrice to be alive, leading to self-deception. But it tuned out, it seems, that the survivor was in fact Quigley. By the end of the series, despite the continuing air of mystery, many questions have been answered - the orphans accept in the course of The End that their parents are dead. Since O and K die on screen, and, as Dante says, are buried, I don't think there has to be any doubt there. This is off-topic but it's still about ASOUE so: I'm not too convinced by the "Quigley is the survivor" theory. Some have questioned whether Quigley was even telling the truth in TSS, but while I don't doubt he was, I don't think he's a massively reliable source. Many questions in the series are given answers, but few of them are definite: whether "V.F.D." even stands for "Volunteer Fire Department" was debatable until ?3 was published; before then, it was just a reasonable guess from Quigley. That he is the survivor of the fire is another guess of his, but one I trust less. Although "the Snicket file" is probably its most common name, it is also called "the Baudelaire file", and the picture on page 13 is of Lemony, Jacques, Bertrand and Beatrice. The Quagmires are never mentioned to be anything to do with the file until Quigley comes along. It makes more sense to me that the writer of the file had heard rumours (or even consensus among "experts") of a survivor of the fire that destroyed the Baudelaire mansion, but these rumours were untrue, and Quigley's survival of the Quagmire fire is coincidental but unrelated.
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Post by Hermes on Sept 26, 2016 12:48:53 GMT -5
Well, first of all, it is actually confirmed within ASOUE that VFD stands for Volunteer Fire Department - first by Captain Widdershins saying 'it began that way', then absolutely explicitly in Chapter 13 of The End. So I think it's likely that the answers we get in TSS are meant to to be right, although they are not immediately confirmed, since Handler wants to pile on the sense of mystery at this point.
The main reason I think Quigley is the survivor is this. In TUA, Dr Sebald tries to send a message to Monty saying 'hidden in the snowman is a survivor of the fire'. In his notes for the film, there is a a picture of three children of about the same age, two of whom were sent to Prufrock Prep: and the original, deleted heading of the chapter is 'Where are the Quagmire Orphans Now?'. So I think that at this point DH intended the survivor to be Quigley. Now it's true that TSS retcons Quigley's story, leaving out the bit about his hiding in a snowman; but I don't see that the idea that he is the survivor needs to have been abandoned.
As for the Snicket File, my guess is that Lemony managed to decode Dr Sebald's message, and on the basis of that added the note to the file. He may well have believed that it referred to the Baudelaire fire: it's clear that he wants there to be a survivor of the Baudelaire fire. But Quigley was in fact the source of the rumour.
I think we are agreed that there was no real survivor of the Baudelaire fire. I think there is a theme of self-deception here: note that the 'survivor of the fire' theme is introduced in the book which begins with 'picturing something doesn't make it so'. But I think having Quigley as the source of the rumour is more satisfying than saying it just comes from nowhere.
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Post by Dante on Sept 26, 2016 13:56:32 GMT -5
As ever, I am bound to point out that the two children of three highlighted within Sally Sebald's letter as being sent to Prufrock Prep. (p. 70), once Quigley's hypothetical sojourn in the snowman is eliminated from history, line up better with the two orphans subsequently taken from the school by Ms. K. following the events of TAA (p. 130). With all said and done, I agree that the three were probably intended to be the Quagmires, but with original intentions sacrificed upon the altar of true history then we can only make do with what we have been given. On which note, I will say that either Quigley's alleged status as survivor of the fire is a big fat retcon, or the clues which were intended to allow for this solution were so misleading as to actually disprove their own conclusion. One of the Snicket File's very authors, during the period the report was being compiled, was living with Quigley at the time! So much for "experts now suspect that there may in fact be a survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown."
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Post by Hermes on Sept 26, 2016 14:19:37 GMT -5
Well, it depends what we're trying to find out. If we're trying to find out what 'really' happened, then indeed Quigley can't be the survivor Dr Sebald had in mind, and instead he must be identified with the brother of the two orphans recruited by Kit. (And that is the way I have gone in The Good Guardian.)
But if we're trying to find out DH's intentions, it looks as if at the time of TUA he was planning to make Quigley the survivor; that he already had some of his later story planned at that point (given the entry for 'overboard' in the index): and that when he wrote the later story he has Q identify himself as the survivor, which suggests to me his intention had not changed in substance. I suspect he just wanted us to forget about the snowman. If we are committed to finding accounts of everything that are as consistent as possible, except when things can be explicitly ascribed to unreliable narrators, we will often have to come up with theories that are more complex than the author had in mind.
As for the Snicket File, that's one of the most confusing things in the story anyway. It seems to have metamorphosed at some point from a file about a Snicket to a file by the Snickets: in addition, we are told both that the Snickets were working on it together, obviously quite recently if it mentions the Baudelaire fire, and that they have not seen each other for a very long time. I don't know how to reconcile this. But it doesn't seem to me impossible that L added this note to the file, and J did not see it again before it was deposited in the Library of Records.
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Post by gliquey on Sept 26, 2016 14:24:19 GMT -5
Well, first of all, it is actually confirmed within ASOUE that VFD stands for Volunteer Fire Department - first by Captain Widdershins saying 'it began that way', then absolutely explicitly in Chapter 13 of The End. So I think it's likely that the answers we get in TSS are meant to to be right, although they are not immediately confirmed, since Handler wants to pile on the sense of mystery at this point. My mistake. Perhaps this was too pedantic but I didn't count Widdershins, as he slightly sidesteps Violet's direct "We thought V.F.D. stood for Volunteer Fire Department" and starts off by saying "V.F.D. wasn't just a fire department" but I do have to concede that I missed the confirmation in Chapter Thirteen of TE. If I'm understanding your point about TUA correctly, it is that although the snowman story turns out to be irrelevant, as it is later contradicted by (or at least omitted from) Quigley's account, it highlights the fact that Handler intended at that point for Quigley to be the survivor. I think to me, though, what the author actually intended is sometimes irrelevant in fiction. I do agree that the TUA chapter does hint quite strongly that Handler was going to make Quigley the survivor, but I just think there's something clumsy about Quigley being the survivor - it has always felt like a poor retcon to me (or if it was intended as the solution from the start, I feel THH is too misleading) - and so as long as there is nothing that outright proves me wrong I think I will prefer that idea that the rumours were not about Quigley. Although your idea about Lemony discovering Sebald's message is a very neat idea, and I see your point about having no explanation for the rumour at all being unsatisfying. We are certainly agreed that there was no survivor of the Baudelaire fire, and it would have surprised me greatly had such a fortunate event occurred in a series which reminds us so frequently how terrible a story it describes. The self-deception link is a clever one.
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Post by lsandthebooks on Sept 27, 2016 6:54:39 GMT -5
I have an idea about Quigley, but I just wanted to post for now that if there was so much foreshadowing about other details, why weren't Lemony's other deaths mentioned directly anywhere? I was hoping you guys had more details. But you guys went off topic.
I actually really like the theory (someone posted on a thread here) where Lemony did die right before Violet was born, and so that's why the Baud parents killed Olaf's, for revenge, because they thought Olaf had done something. But...if it was justified, then why did Dewey act like he was embarrassed in Book 12 when Olaf told the kids to ask him what happened with the poison darts? Why be embarrassed?
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