Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 23:19, 14 November 2006

Template:Endbookneighbor

The End is the thirteenth and final novel in the book series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler The book starts with Count Olaf and the Baudelaires on a boat the size of a large bed, far away from the burning Hotel Denouement. Count Olaf is bragging about burning the Hotel Denouement and how he has destroyed V.F.D. once and for all. However, a storm brews up, and batters the Baudelaires' boat through the night. The following morning, they find themselves on a large coastal shelf. While looking for land they find Count Olaf, who ostensibly reassumes his command over the orphans, though the net result is that the group simply continues looking for an island just as before. On locating and walking towards the island, they meet a six or seven year old girl called Friday. Olaf, who had previously proclaimed himself king of Olaf-Land, threatens the girl with his harpoon gun and orders her to bow to him. Friday ignores him, and invites the Baudelaires to come with her to the colony, telling Olaf to go away. Along the way, she describes what the islanders do with their time--all year long, they build an outrigger on the shelf, and once a year the water rises high enough to totally submerge the shelf and allow the outrigger to set sail. This is known as Decision Day, and on this day anyone who wants to leave can board the ship and sail away. Otherwise, the boat is lit on fire and set adrift.

The Baudelaires are welcomed into an island colony, where it finally seems that there is no treachery whatsoever. The island facilitator, Ishmael, a man who claims he cannot walk due to sore feet and who continually asks people to "call Ish", introduces the Baudelaires to the strange island customs; e.g., the islanders must always wear white robes, anything found on the continental shelf that is not (in his view) required for life on the island is to taken by sheep over a brae to the colony's arboretum. Also, Ishmael has the islanders (practically all named after famous literary or historical castaways) introduce themselves to the Baudelaires. It becomes clear that, though he always begins his suggestions by saying "I won't force you", his decisions go largely unquestioned and his suggestions are obeyed like orders. Afterward, a woman called Mrs. Caliban comes into the tent, gives them a lunch of bland ceviche, and announces that she is the mother of Friday and the main cook on the island. They make a toast to the "Baudelaire orphans" (despite their not yet having mentioned the fact of their lost parents to anyone) with the strange coconut cordial which everybody carries a flask of at all times, but which the orphans themselves dislike.

After another storm, the Baudelaires find a giant pile of books on the coastal shelf, tied together in the shape of a cube with a very-pregnant Kit Snicket lying unconscious on top, along with the Incredibly Deadly Viper from Uncle Monty's collection. The island people soon join the scene, along with Count Olaf, poorly disguised as another Kit Snicket (with the diving-helmet containing the Medusoid Mycelium tucked under his dress as his supposed baby), but despite the fact that the islanders (for once) immediately see through Olaf's flimsy disguise and imprison him in a large birdcage, they end up debating whether the orphans should be expelled from the colony as well when Olaf spitefully reveals that the Baudelaires are still carrying contraband items that Ishmael had earlier "suggested" they dispose of (such as Violet's hair ribbon and Klaus' commonplace book). Ishmael is carried out to the gathering on the shelf and decides that the children, Kit, and Olaf should all be abandoned unless they agree to abide by the colony's rules. He seems unconcerned with the fact that Decision Day is quickly approaching, and anyone left out on the coastal shelf will certainly drown. After everyone leaves, Olaf tries to tempt the children to let him out of the cage by promising to explain the many mysteries and secrets which they have been surrounded by since The Bad Beginning, but they ignore him until he falls asleep.

That night, two of the islanders sneak out with a basket of food for the Baudelaires, as well as a favor to ask of them. A group of discontented colonists are planning a mutiny against Ishmael in the morning, and the Baudelaires are told to go over to the aboretum where all the contraband items are collected, and find or make some weapons to use in the rebellion "just in case". Further, the mutineers refuse to help Kit (who recently regained consciousness and, though injured, hates the idea of contributing to yet another schism) unless the Baudelaires do so. They agree in the end, and set off for the aboretum, which is basically a huge junk-yard situated beneath a vast apple tree. The orphans discover a well-appointed living area built beneath the tree, before they are in turn discovered by Ishmael (who can walk perfectly well and has been using the aboretum's comfortable living area for himself). They learn that their parents were once the island's leaders and were responsible for many improvements meant to make island-life easier and more pleasant, but they were eventually overthrown by Ishmael, who believed that a strictly-enforced simple life (combined with the opiate of the coconut cordial) was the best way to avoid conflict. They also find an enormous book written by the many different people who had served as island leaders, including their parents and Ishmael, as a history of the island. The book was titled A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The Baudelaires, with Ishmael, go back to the other side of the island, where the mutiny is already in full-swing just as Count Olaf returns (still in disguise). After a brief exchange, Ishmael harpoons Olaf in the stomach, which shatters the helmet and releases the Medusoid Mycelium, infecting the island's entire population at once. The Baudelaires run back to the arboretum to try to find some horseradish (the only cure for the fungus). They learn from the history-book that their parents had actually hybridized the tree's apples with horseradish, causing the fruit to taste bitter but also to cure the effects of the Medusoid Mycelium. With the Baudelaires on the verge of death, Ink (the Incredibly Deadly Viper) slithers up to them and offers them an apple. After sharing the apple and curing themselves, they then rush to gather more apples for the island's inhabitants, only to discover that the island people, mutineers and supporters alike, have all already boarded their outrigger canoe and are preparing to set sail, blaming the Baudelaires for their misfortune. Ishmael callously refuses to allow the bitter apples onboard, though it is clear that he himself has already eaten one to cure himself, and the boat full of wheezing islanders sails away. (It is mentioned, however, that Ink may have succeeded in getting one curative apple to the departing islanders without Ishmael noticing, to tide them over until they can cure themselves properly).

Kit tells the Baudelaires the fate of the Quagmires, Hector, Captain Widdershins and his two stepchildren Fernald and Fiona; after reuniting on Hector's float, they are attacked by trained eagles, who pop their balloon and send them hurtling back to the the ruins of the Queequeg. There, they are taken by the mysterious object shaped like a question mark (encountered once before when they were on the Queequeg). The author goes on to call the question mark "The Great Unknown", which is often an euphemism for what comes after death. In turn, the Baudelaires confess their own crimes committed at the Hotel Denoument, and the four of them all cry together for all the sorrows in the world. At this point, Kit is about to go into labour, and also seems to be dying of the fungus, but cannot eat the bitter apple due to the hybrid's unhealthy effects on pregnant women and unborn babies. She is still trapped on top of the cube of books (her Vaporetto (boat) of Favorite Detritus) but when the critically-injured and fungus-choked Olaf hears that she is still alive, he takes a bite of an apple and manages to get her safely down onto the beach, giving her a single soft kiss as he lays her on the sand and collapses beside her. Kit recites the poem "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" by Francis William Bourdillon, answered by Olaf reciting the final stanza of Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse" before collapsing and dying with a short, sharp laugh. The Baudelaires help Kit give birth, and she dies immediately afterward due to the Medusoid Mycelium. Before this, however, she asks them to give the baby the name of one of their parents, maintaining the tradition of both the Baudelaires and the Snickets of naming their children after dead friends. Here The End ends with the Baudelaires becoming Kit's child's adopted parents. They bury Kit and Olaf, apparently next to each other, somewhere on the island.

After an author page stating that Snicket is 'almost finished', Chapter Fourteen (significant because prior books in the series have only had thirteen chapters) is seen. It takes place a year later as the Baudelaires prepare to leave the island with the baby girl. The boat on which they leave the island (which is built from the remains of the yacht on which they arrived in the first place) is revealed to have been originally named Beatrice, after the Baudelaire's own mother. Kit's daughter reads the ship's name and simultaneously says her own, confirming once and for all that Beatrice was the Baudelaires' mother.

With a final picture of the question mark object in the water, the reader is left to wonder whether Violet, Klaus, Sunny, and little Beatrice will find fortune or misfortune on their journey back to civilization. They decide to leave the huge book A Series of Unfortunate Events on the island for whoever washes up at the abandoned colony next.

Although Lemony Snicket says he does not know what befell the Baudelaire orphans, other books by him indicate that the Baudelaires do in fact reach the mainland and all three orphans survive and grow up. The Beatrice Letters makes reference to Sunny when she is older, and The Reptile Room speaks of Klaus, many years later, wishing he had pushed Count Olaf back into his taxi, while The Bad Beginning: Rare Edition mentions that Violet will return to Briny Beach a third time, possibly after meeting a group of Female Finnish Pirates. As the younger Beatrice, in The Beatrice Letters, is searching for Violet, Klaus and Sunny, it can be presumed that she will be separated from the Baudelaires at some point.

Symbolism

Template:Spoiler One of the overarching images of the book is a tree that produces bitter apples on the island on which the Baudelaires are shipwrecked. The tree houses a 'library' or 'catalogue' of knowledge underneath its branches, and in fact in a hidden room underneath the tree itself. This, together with the friendly snake who provides the orphans an apple in their hour of need, and the discussions they have with Ishmael about whether knowledge is something from which people should be protected if they wish to avoid strife, seems to refer to the Fall of Man, a story from Genesis featuring Adam and Eve.

One of the book's themes is the conflict between the desire for knowledge and the desire for protection. Ishmael, who values protection over knowledge, hides the existence of the tree-library from the islanders, while the Baudelaires seek out its knowledge. The knowledge in the tree presents them with the need to make a conscious decision between knowledge and protection. They choose knowledge. The other islanders choose to escape the truth via alcohol and the protection of their bearded patriarch. The orphans try in vain to persuade the islanders to see the truth, but Ishmael's continued assertions the truth is undesirable and subjective ("it depends on how you look at it") convince the islanders otherwise.

Also notable is that that the Fall of man is one of the first stories in the Bible. Its apparent parallel serves as the last story of the Series of Unfortunate Events. The End explicitly discusses how no story really has a true beginning nor end, as all the world's stories intersect with those that came before and after.

Differences

• This book is the only book in the series without an alliterative title.
• The American cover has the same illustration as the British cover. The only other book in the series to use the same cover picture for both editions is The Penultimate Peril.
• On October 10th (or, in the United Kingdom, the 9th) an audio CD called The Tragic Treasury was released, featuring all the songs from the audio versions of the books. The song title for The End was "Shipwrecked".
• This is the only A Series Of Unfortunate Events book to have more than thirteen chapters (not counting "Not a Chapter" and "Also Not a Chapter" in The Penultimate Peril, and not counting the extra page of chapter five in The Carnivorous Carnival, and also counting Chapter Fourteen as a chapter of The End and not a book in its own right, although it is treated that way).
• The ersatz ending to The End was the first instance that artist Brett Helquist and Author Lemony Snicket had swapped their billing places in the pictorial credits. Brett, dressed in Snicket's usual fashion, was photographed and on top, while Lemony, face exposed save for cucumber slices over his eyes, was drawn underneath—a comic depiction of Snicket, as he is shown relaxing beside a pool with a cocktail, when he (as are the Baudelaires) is usually depicted as terribly unfortunate. Their roles revert to their traditional billing places at the true conclusion of the book.
• The UK Edition does not contain the correct image for Chapter Two, nor were the final pictures in the book included. This was due to a mix-up in the printing of the British version and as of early 2007 the book should include these images.

Literary allusions

• Lemony Snicket continues to make references to other classic novels in The End. The character Ishmael is named after the narrator of Moby-Dick. Snicket's Ishmael constantly says "Call me Ish," a reference to "Call me Ishmael," the opening line of Moby-Dick. The submarine in The Grim Grotto, the Queequeg, is also named after a character in Moby-Dick, and the crew wear uniforms bearing an image of the novel's author, Herman Melville.
• All of the people in the colony take their names from more or less famous castaways from literature or are connected to such castaways. There is Ishmael (call me Ish), a reference to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick which itself references Ishmael, older brother to the biblical Isaac. There are the obvious Robinson and Friday from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Calypso from Homer’s Odyssey, Marlow and Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Furthermore, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest provides Miranda, Caliban, Alonso, Ariel and Ferdinand while Larsen, Weyden and Brewster are taken from Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. Sherman in all likelihood is from William Pène du Bois’s The Twenty-One Balloons. Erewhon (which is an anagram of "nowhere") and Omeros are actually places, from the novel by Samuel Butler and the poem by Derek Walcott, respectively. Real castaways are Fletcher and Bligh, both from Mutiny on the Bounty, some parts of it set on the island of Pitcairn, fictionalized by Charles Nordhoff (Snicket uses the incorrect spelling Nordoff) and James Norman Hall who also included Byam in their novel. Jonah, a Biblical character, was swallowed by a giant fish. Finn is quite likely a reference to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, who traveled the Mississippi on a raft. Sadie Bellamy refers to two historical pirates: Captain Samuel Bellamy, written about in Defoe's A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates published under the pen name Captain Charles Johnson and Sadie the Goat, a notorious female pirate in the Charlton Street Gang who raided merchant ships and homes on the Hudson River in the mid-1800s.
• The final colonist Willa may be a reference to the American author Willa Cather. From her novel My Mortal Enemy (1926): "When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless."
• The castaways, who dress in white and whose consumption of the the coconut cordial keeps them docile, are an allusion to the Lotus Eaters encountered in the Odyssey. Also, Sunny calls the cordial "Lethe," a river whose waters cause forgetfulness in Greek mythology. The sheep strapped together are also a possible allusion to the Odyssey: Odysseus hides his men under sheep strapped together to escape the cyclops' cave; the orphans find it easier to simply walk when they need to escape.
• The poem Olaf recites at the end (and, presumably, the choice of a "coastal shelf" as an important setting in the novel) comes from the poem This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin.
• The story bears many similarities to the Garden of Eden. In the center of the island is an apple tree which holds knowledge of the outside world, and the apples of this tree can only be eaten when leaving the island. Also, the Incredibly Deadly Viper holds the apple in his mouth when he gives it to Violet, just as Satan, in the form of a serpent, gave the apple to Eve. (Note that the Biblical story does not explicitly mention apples as the fruit, but in fiction and art they are usually depicted as such.) The traditional Western Christian interpretation of the Garden of Eden myth holds that Eve became responsible for the fallen state of humanity when she ate the fruit. But in Snicket's version, eating the fruit can be seen as a rite of passage to adulthood, as the children leave once and for all the sheltered life that their parents kept them in and take on a life of parenthood themselves, aware that it is far better to allow your children to live life fully -- and even dangerously -- than to shelter them forever.
• In addition to the characters, Miranda Caliban and Ariel, whose names come from Shakespeare's "The Tempest," there is also a reference to the ship "Prospero," another character from the same play. Furthermore, the book's plot is not unlike the plot of "The Tempest," in which characters wash ashore on a mysterious island.
• When Sunny asks 'Why are you telling us about this ring?', the word she uses is 'Neiklot', or 'Tolkien' backwards.

Possible Secrets

• In the last section of the book (Chapter Fourteen), there is a fake copyright page which has the following underneath the copyright.

Ô mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! Levons l'ancre!

Ce pays nous ennuie, Ô mort! Appareillons!
Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre.

Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!

This is the first verse of the eighth and final part of Charles Baudelaire's poem, "Le Voyage," from Les Fleurs Du Mal. It is translated by William Aggeler as follows:

O Death, old captain, it is time! let's weigh anchor!

This country wearies us, O Death! Let us set sail!
Though the sea and the sky are black as ink,

Our hearts which you know well are filled with rays of light!

References

1. "One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum..." The End, p. 288.
2. William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Cover images

• US, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian cover US, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian cover
• UK cover UK cover

• 2006 novels
• Lemony Snicket
• Lemony Snicket books