What ever happened to...

[cephaus]

Am I the only one who's wondering what ever became of the snicket file?

Does anyone else have new information on the subject?

It seems like it's rarely mentioned after TSS...

(Close topic if dupe)

[Dante]

The first twelve pages were last seen (that I can find) being held by Olaf as he scolded Sunny for cooking with a Verdant Flammable Device. I don't believe it appears after that; Olaf could have burnt it, stuffed it in his pocket and forgotten about it, or folded it into a little paper boat and sailed it down the Stricken Stream - we don't know (although Klaus still has the last page glued in the first page of his commonplace book). In any case, TSS seems to have retconned it such that the thirteenth page refers to Quigley Quagmire, despite the fact that this doesn't fit with the photograph and accompanying text on the final page (which switched position in TGG, incidentally), the file being named by Esmé in THH as "the Baudelaire file" (immediately after the Baudelaires discovered it themselves, although Olaf calls it "the Snicket file" at the end of the book) the suggestion in the U.A. that there was a survivor of the Baudelaire fire, or Olaf's own belief (after reading the file) that Quigley was dead. I'd guess it was retconned in TSS and forgotten about in favour of the sugar bowl, which took centre stage in the following two books.

[fiendishthingie]

I'd guess it was retconned in TSS and forgotten about in favour of the sugar bowl

Which was also forgotten about, in favour of the Baud Mom Mystery. There you go. ;D

[thrillhouse1980]

ffwf said:

TSS seems to have retconned it such that the thirteenth page refers to Quigley Quagmire,

I think it makes sense that the 13th page refers to the man facing away from the camera as being the survivor of "the fire" which most people speculate is actually Lemony Snicket.

This fits because Kit believes Lemony to be dead in TE, and although she never explains exactly how he died, all of this suggests that the Snickets had their own fire which they were caught in, and Lemony was thought to have perished in it.

Obviously this mirrors exactly what happened to the Quagmires...

[Dante]

thrillhouse1980 said:

I think it makes sense that the 13th page refers to the man facing away from the camera as being the survivor of "the fire" which most people speculate is actually Lemony Snicket.

This fits because Kit believes Lemony to be dead in TE, and although she never explains exactly how he died, all of this suggests that the Snickets had their own fire which they were caught in, and Lemony was thought to have perished in it.

Obviously this mirrors exactly what happened to the Quagmires...

I based my statement on Quigley's declaration in TSS upon revealing his identity, "I think the survivor is here," (p156) and the fact that the Baudelaires in TGG, in their most recent look at the last page of the Snicket File after having met Quigley, no longer believe that the page means that one of their parents is alive (p269). We can infer that they're apparently convinced that Quigley's the mentioned survivor, and given Snicket's own silence and lack of contradictions on that issue, it's fair to assume that's the view he's getting across, if only to close off that subplot. It's simple and makes sense given how Snicket wrote the continuing books, even if I do dislike it.

Olivia's mention in TCC of Olaf having formerly claimed he could obtain the "Snicket fortune" (p31) (perhaps by marrying Kit? That might be an interesting angle to follow up) does bode well for there being such a Snicket fire, given that it happened to the Baudelaires, Quagmires, and apparently the Duchess of Winnipeg (the fortune of whom Esmé claims in TSS she can get through kidnapping the Snow Scouts, after the sinister duo allude to burning down the homes of their parents). Kit, too, does apparently believe in The End that both of her brothers are gone (p308) (although this seems like a retcon, since some of her statements in TPP make it sound like she believes Lemony is alive ("Jacques was my brother. Because of the schism, I haven't seen either of my brothers for years" (p30)), and it's speculated by some that she met him, as Justice Strauss's taxi-driver, when she left at the end of Chapter Two (p46) in the same direction that she'd came (the direction which Justice Strauss's taxi may have followed (p16)); however, there's a problem with Lemony being the survivor of the fire: Firstly, Jacques, also in the photograph, is alive and well up to TVV, so the file would either have to refer to him instead with Lemony being a secret survivor (which rather beats the point of the survivor of the fire having been a secret anyway), or he just happened to be in that photograph and the sentence doesn't refer to him (pointlessly misleading) or he wasn't in the fire at all (in which case the situation becomes more complicated than the situation it's attempting to explain). Secondly, the file is about the "Snicket fires," according to Hal in THH (p70), and if one assumes that these are supposedly fires striking Snicket households, it again overcomplicates a situation which remains completely unreferenced in the series - unless one assumes that the "Snicket fires" are fires supposedly committed by a Snicket, and we know Lemony is wanted for arson (TSS p101). Thirdly, according to Quigley in TSS, apparently the Snicket siblings wrote the Snicket file (p195), which makes the photograph on the last page a pointlessly misleading inclusion and causes the language of the final sentence, again, to be pointlessly opaque, since they'd all know that each other had survived the "Snicket fire" since they're all writing this file together. Plus there's not actually any evidence to support such a fire as you propose having happened, and anyone who got out of such a fire, including Kit and Jacques, would also be considered survivors, so they'd have to have not been at home that day (although this same argument has been used against Quigley as survivor of the fire). Altogether, despite the retcon and the out-of-place photograph (which can probably be explained by some invention or other; top of my head, it was the last time all three Snicket siblings (Kit being the photographer (possibly the photographer of the Baudelaires in TWW that was sent to Olivia in TCC (p140-141), given that the pair of them were in communication (The End p209)) were together on a happy occasion, and the Baudelaires, who they were good friends with (BBRE 172 and 176 indicates that the Snickets spent regular time at the Baudelaire home) were present as well).

[thrillhouse1980]

Thanks for the extensive response Dante. I get what you're saying. I misremembered what the caption was on the 13th page of the snicket file actually said. The actual caption is "Because of the evidence discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown."

I was thinking that it was meaning a Previously Unknown survivor as opposed to being an only survivor.

Its all quite complicated to be sure, being it's not even certain whether or not the photo and caption even go together.

[Dante]

Trivia: I vaguely mentioned this earlier, but from THH to TSS, the caption was above the photograph, but in TGG it's below. I wonder if that's significant in Handler's mind; having the caption below the photograph makes it sound more like it's related, whereas with the caption above the photograph then the photograph could just be a nice concluding image.

To be fair, you can argue for either Quigley or Lemony (or Beatrice, or potentially other unrelated characters we might not even have heard of), particularly with the whole issue being fairly ambiguous and not really resolved. It's just a matter of picking out the right pieces of evidence and trying not to look at the holes. I'm not all happy with Quigley being the survivor; I'm just not too thrilled with the alternatives, and I'm just going with what I believe Handler wanted us to think.

[queequegcaptain]

Also, Ishmael read the last Snicket page. He kept Klaus's common place book, and they found it in Ishmael's library.