A Series Of Unfortunate Events English Literature Essay

A Series Of Unfortunate Events English Literature Essay â€Å"Although he said he was the executor, Violet felt like Mr. Poe was the executioner.† The Bad Beginning is the first book in the book series A Series of Unfortunate Events written by Lemony Snicket. The Bad Beginning marks a tragic start to the series with the Baudelaire children becoming Baudelaire orphan to the series of unfortunate events that is to follow. The story began with the Baudelaire children (Violet, Klaus and Sunny) playing by the beach when the executor of their parents’ affairs, Mr. Poe, suddenly appears and tells them that their parents perished in a horrible fire. Depressed and lonely, the children who were now orphans were told that they would live with their closest relative, a man by the name of Count Olaf. Count Olaf treats the children poorly and forced them to perform chores every single day whilst cooking up a plan to steal their fortune. The Baudelaires soon come to realize this and made an attempt to find out about his plan. Count Olafâ €™s plan of marrying Violet during the play The marvelous marriage in order to obtain the Baudelaire fortune was known to the three Baudelaires. In an attempt to continue his plans, Count Olaf threatens to take the life of Sunny, the youngest Baudelaire, by dropping her from a 30 ft tower should the other two â€Å"misbehaves†. In a desperate attempt to escape this horrible fate violet signed the paper with her left hand instead of her right and waited to reveal this secret only after Count Olaf have released Sunny. However, Count Olaf escapes and vows revenge on the children. In the story, the main protagonists, the Baudelaire children, are a very talented bunch of children. Violet, who had â€Å"a real knack for inventing and building†, constructed a grappling hook from dirty cloths and a curtain rod. Klaus, â€Å"the middle child and the only twelve† have â€Å"read a great many books and had retained a lot of the information from his readings†. Su nny, who was only a baby, likes to bite things and is tiny in size. â€Å"What she lacked in size, however, she made up for with the size and sharpness of her teeth.† Count Olaf, whose name sounds like that of a vampire, is the main antagonist. He is a villain that tries to take the Baudelaire fortune. He is best characterized by the following thought from violet; â€Å"The really frightening thing about Count Olaf, she realized, was that he was very smart after all. He wasn’t merely an unsavory drunken brute, but an unsavory, clever drunken brute.† The Bad Beginning focuses clearly on one pessimistic theme; the theme of this novel is that the world can be tough and cruel, often getting worse as time progresses. The story first starts with Mr. Poe informing the children about the loss of their parents and gets worse with the introduction of Count Olaf as the Baudelaire orphan’s new guardian. The Baudelaire’s luck then gets even worse when Count Ola f becomes hell-bent on taking their fortune. Then the story reaches its climax (ironically the part with the Baudelaire orphans in the worst situation possible) when Count Olaf threatens to kill Sunny Baudelaire. Finally, at the end of the novel, even when Count Olaf’s plot has been revealed, he still manages to escape with all his assistants from the authorities vowing revenge against the Baudelaires.