I find it interesting how in All the Wrong Questions, ?4, Lemony enters into a forest at the end, symboling his new path. Didn’t 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 “Beatrice [...] accompanying Olaf” anywhere that I didn’t consider the “strange forest” could be Snicket’s own clusterous labyrinth (4.281). It’s striking that the mysterious future Snicket enters at the end of ATWQ may literally contain his adulthood’s closest companion and greatest enemy respectively.
I’ll avoid waxing philosophical on Snicketverse morality, but it’s interesting how Handler’s 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 (“Yer don't know who I am, I suppose, Work'us?”) but Oliver himself speaks in “proper” English that Dickens’ 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. It’s not hard to be young at heart; what makes Handler exceptional is that he understands writing like a kid isn’t the most convincing way to write a kid.
