I find it interesting how in All the Wrong Questions, ?4, Lemony enters into a forest at the end, symboling his new path. Didnât someone else say Olaf was also off exploding a forest? Do you find this significant? Also, how do you feel the moral themes of the book and perceptions of adulthood, from a writer who is already an adult? As an adult reader, I found myself sympathizing and relating to the child characters, as I have also suffered from incompetent adults even as a young adult.
I was so scandalized by the idea of âBeatrice [...] accompanying Olafâ anywhere that I didnât consider the âstrange forestâ could be Snicketâs own clusterous labyrinth (4.281). Itâs striking that the mysterious future Snicket enters at the end of ATWQ may literally contain his adulthoodâs closest companion and greatest enemy respectively.
Iâll avoid waxing philosophical on Snicketverse morality, but itâs interesting how Handlerâs kid characters toggle maturity. When my hunger for education the year after college snuck me into a UW Milwaukee classroom, one English class taught me how all the urchins surrounding Oliver Twist speak in mangled vernacular (âYer don't know who I am, I suppose, Work'us?â) but Oliver himself speaks in âproperâ English that Dickensâ upper-middle class readers would have unconsciously recognized as their own. In the same way Oliver uses upper-middle class English, all my favorite kid characters articulate themselves in the syntactical and emotional language of adults: Calvin and Hobbes, Lisa Simpson, and of course, Lemony Snicket. Itâs not hard to be young at heart; what makes Handler exceptional is that he understands writing like a kid isnât the most convincing way to write a kid.
