At the end ATWQ, *SPOILERS* do you have any thoughts on why, in-story and writing/meaning reasons, the Associates reject Lemony at the end? Is it because he became an adult or was becoming an adult as conceptualized in the story? Or was it something else?
Whether or not Snicket became an adult is a complex question. His “apprenticeship [is] over” (4.291), but the last thing he tells anyone before disappearing is that he’s “not old enough” (4.288), an assertion laden with irony and a callback to the Bombinating Beast not attacking him in SYBIS because it’s “not old enough” (3.221) to harm anyone. By the end of ATWQ both the Beast and Snicket have aged out of this inability and Snicket has fulfilled his destiny of becoming Hangfire’s disciple. Hangfire, ATWQ’s largest-looming embodiment of adulthood, may look “peaceful” and “as if something at last was his” (4.252) during the Beast’s siege because he’s completed his true objective of passing on his legacy. In SYBIS, the “box of matches in [Snicket’s] pocket” implied his potential to turn into an adult arsonist like Hangfire, and he’s held back only by childish beliefs like “adults should[n’t] be encouraged to smoke” (3.27). In the climax of WITNDFAON, Snicket now likens Hangfire to his “teacher” (4.245) and credits him for instruction on how to “play” (4.248) the Beast statue and unleash his potential for destruction.Â
I’ve always held it as a weak deus ex machina that ATWQ’s master of treachery could be defeated with a deception as plain as “what’s that behind you”. I can only justify it as the metaphorical gateway into Snicket’s “wild, lawless” place, that he commits a sort of ur-deception or “very old trick” so archetypal that, like “the old myths and superstitions” (4.246), its recounting requires the Association of Associates to recite it like a Greek chorus outside the derailed train. Snicket’s apprenticeship in Stain’d-by-the-Sea ends not just because he murders Hangfire, but because he tricks Hangfire with malicious intent, because he summons the Beast, and because he reveals previously suppressing Hangfire’s identity. Eve’s original sin wasn’t a magicked apple but the indelible knowledge that she had the ability to disobey and, what’s more, to lie about it and to implicate others.Â
After Snicket’s misdeeds culminate in a literal trainwreck (in the shape of “a dead serpent” [4.259] that recalls Eden’s lech), Snicket finds that “friend or enemy, associate or stranger, [everyone shrinks] from [him]” (4.258) like he’s “a moving shadow, casting darkness over everyone” (4.286). In essence, he’s like Armstrong Feint. Note the lone cross in Seth’s opening illustration to chapter thirteen, after Snicket reflects that Hangfire was the only person “brave enough to face the beast directly” and who Snicket classifies among “heroes [and] villains” (4.252). It’s uncertain whether Snicket views himself as more “like Armstrong Feint, someone once kind and gentle who lowered himself into treachery, or more like a mysterious beast, hidden in the depths and summoned to wickedness” (4.290), but he now empathizes with both figures. Daniel Handler and I are technically Jewish, but feel free to interpret Hangfire as a Christ figure martyred by his inability to overcome humanity’s disbelief in his message, and Snicket as his reluctant disciple as he records the man’s story in a tetralogy mirroring the four gospels.Â
The series ends with Snicket’s coat housing the Beast statue (and presumably the same box of matches) even as Snicket muses that “long ago, [he] had made a promise to return the statue to its rightful owner” (4.289). Snicket told Theodora in WCTBATH that the Beast “has been associated with the Mallahan family for generations” and that they’re likely the statue’s “rightful owners” (1.93-94). But Snicket doesn’t give the statue to Lady Mallahan’s only competent descendant, nor would Moxie likely want something she now knows brings with it only destruction and covetous frenzy reminiscent of the Maltese Falcon. Despite his misgivings about alienating his friends, Snicket never offers up the totem of chaos, and alongside his warped notion that he “think[s he] kept [his] promise” (4.277) to help Ellington find her father by unmasking and killing him, it’s quite possible Snicket also believes he’s fulfilled his promise to find the statue’s rightful owner: Himself. A statue only capable of chaos would “rightfully” belong to someone capable of chaos, and by tricking Hangfire with malevolent intent, Snicket has wrested ownership of the statue from Hangfire like Malfoy wrested ownership of the Elder Wand from Dumbledore. Even the Beast, raised and nourished by Hangfire, recognizes Snicket’s authority over the hand that fed him; Hangfire points uselessly at Snicket when he speaks his last words, but the Beast only obeys Snicket’s wordless pointing to leave, after looking over “[Snicket and] the statue in [his] hands” (4.254).Â
As discussed in my earlier essay, Snicket never shakes the feeling that he, like Ellington, will always be an outsider to the residents of Stain’d, Associates included. Snicket’s not surprised in the climax that “the Mitchums of the world just bicker” while ignoring evil, or that Gifford and Ghede think it's “not [their] job” to intervene in a wrongful arrest. What ultimately drives Snicket from Stain’d is alienation from his friends. The Association is horrified by Hangfire’s murder because, unlike Snicket, they had only learned his identity moments before his death—And his identity is that of the absent parent, a specter that haunts each Associate. The Association relies on hope, but Snicket quietly believes that “Moxie’s mother [will] never send for her” and “Pip and Squeak's father [is] gone forever” (4.288). That said, the Association’s schism isn’t about Snicket’s deviation from the group’s strict moral code. Moxie laments that Snicket “didn’t have to feed [Hangfire] to that creature” (4.270) while simultaneously dismissing Feint’s orphaned daughter as “deserv[ing] to be in a prison cell” (4.279) for a murder Ellington didn’t commit. Snicket is ultimately as repulsed by the Associates’ hypocrisy as they are by his.
This brings Snicket to his second epiphany, that not only has his apprenticeship ended, but it’s now his responsibility to document its events. This is a postmodern concept of penance, to make amends not to the man Armstrong Feint (by, for example, rescuing his daughter) but to Feint’s story, lest he be erased a second time. Handler distinguishes between signifier and signified several times in the denouement: The town’s ink becoming “weaker and fainter” made the facts it represented appear “less certain” (4.263); Moxie equates Snicket “destroy[ing]” Hangfire to destroying a book and its “important secrets” (4.269); the Beast’s and Snicket’s actions have erased Hangfire’s meaning like “spilled ink across paper” voids the meaning of the words (4.249). Feint and his words “have vanished,” and though Snicket “wish[es]” his actions would too (4.254), he knows these actions obligate him to record his wrongdoing. Snicket ends WCTBATH with “practically none of” its events entering his official report (1.252), and this pattern persists through the second and third books. It’s only after “destroying” a man that Snicket pledges to revive Feint and his story in a fragmentary plot for the librarians. After all, “paper will put up with anything that’s written on it” (4.272), whether it’s spilled ink that destroys important secrets or words that resurrect a dead man “the way an idea moves from a book to your mind” (4.248).
