The Bad Beginning

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.”

The author opens his famous book series with a warning for the squeamish not to venture further. This caution creates exactly the opposite effect, as few young readers will resist a story filled with perils and uncertainty. The alert also sets forth the three children as main characters who are good people and, thus, the protagonists of the story. This opening introduces the metafictional aspects of the text that will both establish the reader’s expectations for tragedy and ultimately encourage them to read on in the book series.

“Violet Baudelaire, the eldest, liked to skip rocks. Like most fourteen-year-olds, she was right-handed, so the rocks skipped farther across the murky water when Violet used her right hand than when she used her left.”

The author has a sense of mischief, and in this quote, he presents information that will come back later to affect the plot in a surprising way. The fact that Violet is right-handed foreshadows her signing her name with her left hand at the end, which negates the marriage contract. It’s an example of the literary device called “Chekhov’s gun,” by which something that appears casually in the opening of a story later gets used suddenly to stunning effect.

“One of the things Violet, Klaus, and Sunny really liked about their parents was that they didn’t send their children away when they had company over, but allowed them to join the adults at the dinner table and participate in the conversation as long as they helped clear the table.”

Instead of cordoning them off at a separate table, the children’s parents respect them enough to include them among the grownups during formal dinners. The children soak up adult conversations and learn a great deal this way, which ultimately provides a foundation for the theme of Ingenuity.