45 pages 1 hour read

Lemony Snicket

The Bad Beginning

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1999

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Background

Literary Context: Unfortunate Events in Children’s Literature

The Bad Beginning combines adventure, satire, and dark comedy into a children’s book. While the dark content seems incongruent with typical subjects of children’s literature, Daniel Handler was influenced by the grim works of writer-illustrator Edward Gorey and the macabre comedies of Roald Dahl. Dahl believed that children were able to deal with the dark side of life, and Handler delivers a heavy dose of trouble to his innocent protagonists. The Bad Beginning hence forms part of a literary landscape with its recent predecessors of transposing adult realism into fantastical comedies appropriate for children.

Handler’s texts include a lot of wordplay. The title of the series to which The Bad Beginning belongs, A Series of Unfortunate Events, contains a pun: It provides a prolepsis for the unhappy endings in the texts but is also a metafictional reference to each book as an “unfortunate event.” The first book contains 13 numbered chapters, and the series contains 13 books; the number 13 itself signifies unfortunate events. 

Literary Context: Baudelaire and Symbolism

The Bad Beginning’s chapters are filled with references to the artistic movement known as Symbolism. This style, centered in France during the mid-to-late 1800s, used words or painted images as symbols that represented the corruption and decadence of life and the dreamed-of ideals of something better in the afterlife.

Related Titles

By Lemony Snicket

SuperSummary Logo
Plot Summary
Lemony Snicket
Guide cover placeholder
SuperSummary Logo
Study Guide
Lemony Snicket
Guide cover image
SuperSummary Logo
Plot Summary
Lemony Snicket
Guide cover placeholder
SuperSummary Logo
Plot Summary
Lemony Snicket
Guide cover placeholder
SuperSummary Logo
Plot Summary
Lemony Snicket
Guide cover placeholder
SuperSummary Logo
Study Guide
Lemony Snicket
Guide cover image
SuperSummary Logo
Plot Summary
Lemony Snicket
Guide cover placeholder
SuperSummary Logo
Plot Summary
Lemony Snicket
Guide cover placeholder