What is your personal theory about the Baudelaires' fate?

[Uncle Algernon]

Apr 27, 2018 8:22:15 GMT -5 Hermes said:

The shipwreck explains why they are hard to find, at least.

Are you sure? I may be wrong, but I assumed the Baudelaire had kept Beatrice with them post-shipwreck and raised her, hence why she calls herself a Baudelaire and is so desperate to find them. 

[takatoguil]

Yeah the only way that Beatrice's timeline makes sense is if:

1- They stayed together for awhile post-sinking, to let her get old enough to have memories of them and be told their story or,

2- She was separated from them, survived despite being least-equipped to do so and for some reason a group of three imposter children raised her.

[Dante]

Or, Option 3, Daniel Handler has an unrealistic idea of when children begin to form memories, and thinks it is plausible for young Beatrice to remember her first year of life. I might allow that anyway simply because infants are extraordinarily capable in ASoUE.

It is clear that young Beatrice has some kind of stable home at the beginning of TBL, given that she refers to having a bedtime; and yet it is also a home which she is able to leave without too much emotional strain. Thus we are free to make all sorts of speculations about her existence between Chapter Fourteen and TBL; that she has been in an orphanage, for instance.

On an unrelated note, even if Sunny appeared on the radio to discuss her recipes, there is no guarantee that she did so under her true name.

[Violent BUN Fortuna]

I never really regarded the reference to her bedtime as an indication that she had a stable home: I took it more to mean that she simply imposed this bedtime upon herself wherever she happened to be (within reason), perhaps because she was used to the Baudelaires setting her an early bedtime and so she continued with this. But I suppose that's really a matter of personal interpretation.

It's true that Sunny may have used a false name, but I would still regard her appearance on the radio as an indication that she at least (and so probably Violet and Klaus, too) feels fairly confident and safe in her post-ASOUE life. Appearing on the radio, even under a false name, would be a huge risk to take if there were still a significant chance of being recognised and captured.

On a related note, I always felt that the fact that Beatrice remembered Sunny appearing on the radio indicated that she did spend some time with them after TE. Obviously, she could simply be remembering an interview she heard long after she was separated from the Baudelaires, but if that were the case then it would probably be significantly easier for her to find them than it seems to have become, especially as Beatrice seems quite adept at trailing people.

EDIT: It has just occurred to me that if any of the Baudelaires had adopted fake names, Beatrice would probably have mentioned this at some point, even if she didn't say what they actually were. Granted, she may not have known if they all did, but she certainly would have known if Sunny used one on the radio. 

[Hermes]

If Beatrice is anything like Sunny (who, we should remember, was good at understanding what the baby said) I can well imagine here having memories from her first year.