The End: Official Discussion

[Deleted]

hermionegranger said:

I didn't understand it all, but I'm pretty sure it was awesome. I just wish we knew what happened to the Quagmires... sequels from their POV, anyone?

I need to read The Beatrice Letters.

Interesting. I guess it would start from their fire to bording school and then so on. Maybe alternating books between D/I and Q until they meet up.

[korovamilkbar14]

Just another small question - is the BB:RE still available in stores? Ot is there a website I could visit? I need to read the notes in the back.

I'm a bit dissapointed in the fact that we never learned of who the taxi driver in TPP was. Most of my friends think it's Lemony, but I'm not so sure.

[Dante]

korovamilkbar14 said:

Just another small question - is the BB:RE still available in stores? Ot is there a website I could visit? I need to read the notes in the back.

PJ's typed them up here.

[korovamilkbar14]

Thank you! Me and my friend have been trying to find them for ages.

[greatunkown]

Long-time lurker / first-time poster here. The more I think about The End, the more I find to like about it. And the more I think about it, the more theories it suggests.

I work in a bookstore, and today I was shelving a book on cryptozoology when something caught my eye: apparently, in the 19th century, the sea serpent was referred to as "the Great Unknown of the seas." This could be irrelevant, but it also sounds like the kind of allusion DH likes to use. He also likes to literalize double meanings (ie: "in the same boat"), so I wonder if he's doing something similar here. We know Lemony gave the ? the nickname "The Great Unknown". So possibly ? is meant to be both a sea serpent AND a stand-in for life's unsolved mysteries.

Which makes me wonder: if the Great Unknown is a serpent, there's always the possiblity it's an Incredibly Deadly Viper type of serpent, and the name is actually a misnomer...

Also, there's some debate about whether baby Beatrice would remember her time on the island. I think we get a big clue about this with Sunny's memory of the Fountain of Victorious Finance. In this passage (and in most of the series), DH implies that children are more conscious of the world than adults think. So if Beatrice is separated from the siblings when their boat sinks, it's not impossible that she would still remember her time with them.

I'll have to spend more time with the book, but I wonder if after the sinking of Beatrice the Boat, whoever's left in VFD takes Beatrice the Baby to be trained, and that's why she isn't able to search for the Baudelaires until the events of TBL.

Hope everyone else is having as much fun with the end of the series as I am.

JT.

[Dear Dairy]

Here's another review, for those of you who asked for that sort of thing. This reviewer gives away too much; she practically re-writes the entire plot. She also spoils quite a bit of TBL as well. I've noticed that many reviewers try their hands at their own Snicket-isms, some with more success than others. I do like this reviewer's phrase "linguistic digressions," though.

I tried posting a link, but it didn't work. I hope these people don't mind if I print their articles in full here (I do give credit to the source).

'The End' is here; of course, it's dismal

By Susan Carpenter, L. A. Times Staff Writer

BOOK REVIEW

If you're among the millions of readers who've suffered through Lemony Snicket's dreary series chronicling the ill-fated Baudelaire orphans and their miserably tragic lives, you may prefer kayaking with a spoon to reading this review.
The story we have to tell is far more dismal than the orphans' relentless chase by an evil thespian. It is much more pathetic than eating a stick of gum for lunch. It is a lot more hopeless than tobogganing through a stream, evading killer leeches or getting out of the many outrageously tricky scenarios the Baudelaires have found themselves in since losing their parents to a fire. No, the story we have to tell is even more tragic than all the tragedies of the previous 12 books combined because Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events" is coming to its disastrously sad and gloomy end.
It is appropriate that "The End" should be released on such an inauspicious date as today, Friday the 13th. "The End" is the 13th, and final, book in the series, which has sold 50 million copies in 40 languages since 1999, when "The Bad Beginning" first left the Baudelaires homeless and on the run from Count Olaf, a decrepit actor with an ankle tattoo, a single eyebrow and an unwavering interest in the children's enormous inheritance.

Subsequent books have seen the siblings shacked up with a herpetologist and a hypochondriac, in a penthouse and at a prep school, living among crows and with a carnival, and working at a hospital and a hotel, which brings us to the horrifying circumstances that make up the beginning of "The End": Violet, the eldest of the Baudelaires, her brother Klaus and sister Sunny are literally stuck in the same boat with Count Olaf, drifting across the sea with no land in sight. There is nothing on board for the ever-resourceful Violet to concoct into an invention that would help them escape, nor are there books for the ever-studious Klaus to read and catalog in his notebook. The single jar of plain white beans on the boat is a culinary challenge even for Sunny, a toddler with an unusual talent for cooking.

As always with the Baudelaire orphans, bad goes to awful, then worse. The boat and its passengers are swept into a storm so violent and terrible that, Snicket writes, "I never wanted to speak of it again." Of course he does — for three pages — in awesomely alliterative detail.

Defying the odds (so the siblings can endure even more torturous scenarios), the Baudelaires end up on an island populated with survivors of other storms. All the inhabitants are dressed in white robes woven from the fur of the island's wild sheep, in an effort to color-coordinate with the white sand on the beach and the healing clay found farther inland. In addition to their matching outfits, everyone on the island is cultishly nice. After all the tumult in Book 12, "The Penultimate Peril," the Baudelaires are relieved to be in such a peaceful, idyllic place, even if life on the island is as bland as the spiceless ceviche served for dinner each night.

Of course the last book in the series wouldn't be unfortunate if Count Olaf didn't wash ashore, which he does, brandishing a diver's helmet filled with spores of the deadly Medusoid Mycelium fungus. But he isn't the only evil soul on the island. The island's leader, the white-robed Ishmael, has a few nefarious tricks up his sleeves as well. It turns out he knew the Baudelaires' parents. They used to live on the island. And much of their mysterious story is told in an enormous handwritten book Ishmael has been hiding — a book also called "A Series of Unfortunate Events."

That brings us to the beginning of the end of "The End."

Lemony Snicket's "The Beatrice Letters," published last month with a shiny gold sticker on the cover saying it is "suspiciously linked to book the thirteenth," offered tantalizing clues to the misfortunes that lie ahead in "The End." "The Beatrice Letters" chronicles the correspondence between Snicket and Beatrice — the person to whom all the books in this truly unfortunate series have been dedicated, and someone we've been led to believe is dead. An antiquarian-style poster accompanying the book depicts a shipwreck and a broken board bearing the name Beatrice. From these "letters," we learn that her name is Beatrice Baudelaire. Could there be a fourth Baudelaire orphan?

That is one of many unanswered questions in the Baudelaires' long, sad story. Were their parents as noble as the orphans believed them to be before they died in the fire at Briny Beach? Are their parents even dead? Will Count Olaf finally get his long, unkempt claws into the Baudelaire family fortune? Who is Lemony Snicket, and why is he telling the Baudelaires' story anyway? Who is Beatrice?

Readers have cried a sea of tears in their attempts to piece together answers, devouring tomes that, by later volumes, got to be a bit bloated and meandering. That is to say, indulgent and longer than necessary. But throughout this final book, Daniel Handler, er Lemony Snicket, is in tip-top shape, a phrase that here means he's delivered a fantastic story that is fast-paced and chock full of the author's trademark linguistic digressions. With this gloriously preposterous tale, Snicket has let his imagination out on its longest leash, bringing readers along on one of his wildest rides yet.

We don't want to spoil The Ending, but we will tell you this: You're sure to be disappointed, in a good way.

[e-mail]

[superorange]

What an awful review. Obviously an amatuer.

[Jacques the Environmentalist]

The review meh.
And no, Fiona does not think her father died of a manatee related accident. She thinks her mother died in one of those. She knows her father moved away, though who he is or why he moved away/where to we never find out.
I don't think it'd make sense for Thursday to be her father. Rather, I know it wouldn't because Friday is only seven years old and by that time Fiona's mother had been married to widdershins for quite some time.

[Dear Dairy]

superorange said:

What an awful review. Obviously an amatuer.

And yet, she's gainfully employed by the Los Angeles Times. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

[asher]

Weren't we supposed to see FFP?

[Sora]

Yes we were, but it was only alluled too in TBB:RE, and from the way the book ended, we can only assume that after the Beatrice wrecked, Violet ended up on Briny Beach, and rescued by FFP. All speculation, but all we have too go on.

[RockSunner]

chilledcucumber said:

After re-reading the first few chapters of TE, I noticed that that Snicket mentions Beatrice telling him about "breaking the ice" while she's eating an apple. Why would he include that? Could it just be a coincidence? Or was there something in there about her eating the apple for a certain reason... Do you think that maybe she was eating the (possible...) apple from the sugar bowl or something? I don't understand why this was included in the story, but it could just be a total coincidence.

This incident seems to have happened before Beatrice and Bertrand were married. Beatrice is in her bedroom alone with Lemony, getting dressed (putting on a sandal). After Beatrice broke her engagement to Lemony, he endured fifteen long and lonely years, forbidden from her presence, and a scene like this would be unlikely. So it looks like Beatrice just likes apples, perhaps leading her to the idea of the hybrid tree later.

[kingvince]

when was there a hypocondriac?

[LargeManFeOrMale]

I just finished and I really liked it, although it cleared up very little, I just loved the way it was wirtten reminded of the earlier books.

[A. the Returned]

I've had a day or two of just letting the book sink in before entering this thread to start theorizing. Unlike many other I read the entire thread from the beginning and was extremely annoyed by the repeats of people who obviously haven't done likewise. So in order to prevent any one having to read me repeat any of the theories that have already been discussed I'll try to stay clear of them completely.
-Ishmael has the same tattoo on his ankle(page 260) as Olaf and the rest of VFD's members, it should be safe to assume he was part of the organization which then leads to the question of whether he could be the I. in the family tree or whether as speculated earlier that was Ike.
-I was thinking about the ASOUE book found in the tree in relation to the two new books set to be published namely 'Orphans' and 'Murder' and wondered if perhaps these two books might be the story of the Baudelaire's the island and their parents as found in this book.
-In the poster from the Beatrice letters the cave side show some sort of canteen, strangely enough it doesn't appear to be a shell containing cordial. Unless the Baudelaires discoved some kind of canteen in the arboretum it is unlikely that the crash of the Beatrice and the subsequent shipwrecked in a cave theory could have happened as they left the island on the Beatrice.

Edit: Ignore the part about ASOUE from the island, I just read the thread for horseradish and discovered it had been discussed there. I guess I didn't read through everything as much as I should, but I guessed as spoilers were to stay within this section... Oh well.