Warning: spoilers for the Penultimate Peril.

*****

Sunny's Sense of Sin. I wish I had taken Mr. Snicket's warnings seriously. I dismissed them as hyperbolic. But as the Baudelaires have grown, and begun to make their way in the world, I see that when he advised me to "put this book down and escape safely...because this awful story is so very dark and wretched...", he was accurate enough. I am no longer sure, in the easy, careless way I was previously, that everything will end well.

I had assumed that it would. The series had the trappings of a fairy-tale: the lost parents, the evil replacement, the convoluted quests with their seemingly nonsensical rules. The happy ending was part of the deal. But a change has taken place in the challenges faced by the Baudelaires in recent books.

I hate feeling helpless. It drives me to distraction when a character in a book or movie is confronted with such overwhelming opposition that resistance is useless. When someone is trapped or beaten I want to rescue them, to appear in the story with a swift roundhouse kick to the head of their attacker and make everything all right. The early perils of the Baudelaires all played to this impulse.

They were powerless children before the adult strength of Count Olaf (as, for example, when Olaf strikes Klaus). Only their sharp wits, their knowledge, and their loyalty to each other let them survive. This weapons are precisely those used by all children against adults. Helpless in any direct confrontation, the orphans became adept at temporary escapes and solutions. But they could never truly escape Olaf, because they lacked the power to implement a terminal solution.

As they grew up, however, they were no longer physically helpless. They were attacked seldom, and the villains began to rely on force multipliers in these confrontations. People stopped grabbing them successfully. Violet, and to some extent Klaus, matured as a sexual being, gaining, in a sense, a real body for the first time. When Sunny declared that she was not a baby, she spoke for all the siblings. They were no longer children, but agents in their own right. They could face their troubles on an equal footing.

Which ought to have been their triumph. They should have been able to do away with Count Olaf, rescue themselves and anyone else who needed it, and live happily ever after. I expected something along these lines.

But Mr. Snicket surprised me with a far more serious theme. Even as the Baudelaires gained power, the effects of its use came back to haunt them. They burned down the carnival, an act which hearkened directly to their enemies' methods. They began to question their own tactics, and their own righteousness. They learned regret.

The Penultimate Peril takes place in a great hotel, which is reflected in a pond before it so perfectly that at first glance one cannot tell the reflection from the reflected. It is managed by two identical brothers, one good, one evil. The constant presence of enantiomorphs plays to the Baudelaires' growing inability to judge by appearances, as they were able to do successfully as children. Now their choices have consequences that reach beyond themselves. It also highlights their ambivalence to their new roles as agents rather than victims. None of them can answer the question, "Are you who I think you are?". The mirrored hotel, the mirrored people bring with them a loss of identity.

If the Grim Grotto taught them that people are not simply villains or volunteers, but a sort of chef's salad, the Penultimate Peril teaches them not that they cannot trust others--a lesson they have learned time and again--but that they cannot trust themselves. When Violet helps Carmelita obtain a harpoon gun, is she acting as a volunteer or a villain? When that harpoon gun goes off and kills their friend Dewey? When the children assist Olaf in burning down the hotel?

The Baudelaires are confronted with a change in identity brought on by a loss of innocence. From a simple tale of good, but powerless children outsmarting an overwhelming evil (the solution to which dilemma would be, gain power), the Series of Unfortunate Events has become a story of three children becoming adults: gaining power even as they lose faith in their ability to use that power with wisdom. The lines between good and evil, which were smeared in previous books, are erased completely now.

We've seen this confusion before, in the constant failure of those around them to develop a maxim with universal applicability; i.e. a categorical imperative. "He (or she) who hesitates is lost", "Give people what the want", etc. all failed in the end. The lesson the Baudelaires have learned is not to trust maxims. But they have not yet learned by what standards they may judge. Or even, in the face of these maxims' constant failure, if such standards exist.

They have lost their innocence and joined forces with the worst villain of them all. Even as they begin to penetrate the mysteries of VFD, learning the codes and customs which so excited them before, these studies seem frivolous in the face of one unanswered question: What does it mean to be a good person? And what do I do if I'm not one?

Because even the goodness of their parents in brought into question. Kit Snicket tells a thrilling tale of espionage at the opera. But her story gains terrible significance when other information strongly suggests that the Baudelaire parents orphaned Olaf. Is the entire story not one of valiant volunteers and vicious villains, but instead a cycle of violence and vengeance? We do not learn the details. But this possibility tears away the last moral certainty of the orphans. If they can't trust the VFD, nor yet their friends, nor their parents, nor, it seems, themselves, what is left for them?

It's a question everyone must deal with at some point. What do I do, now that I am no longer a good person? What do I do, now that I can't make it right? What do I do, now that I don't even know what it means to be good? It's a serious question, and a genuinely heart-wrenching one. I wish I knew how the Baudelaires will answer it.