The Bad Beginning

Klaus Baudelaire “was a little older than twelve and wore glasses, which made him look intelligent. He was intelligent […] He knew how to tell an alligator from a crocodile. He knew who killed Julius Caesar. And he knew much about the tiny, slimy animals found at Briny Beach” (3). Klaus’s accumulation of knowledge is meant to appear random but foreshadows the use to which he will put it throughout the book series. As a close junior to his sister Violet, Klaus is the novel’s second protagonist. He shares her interest in knowledge, and he works well with her when problems arise that they must resolve. His favorite topic is wolves—a typical anthropomorphism of evil in a fairytale—which reflects the fact that he will spend the book series attempting to outmaneuver a hunter of his own, Count Olaf. At his parents’ home, he enjoys reading about wolves and other subjects in their vast library.

The fact that Klaus repeats this practice when visiting Justice Strauss’s home library provides one of the only signifiers of consistency and safety in the children’s home life, and hence his activity allows the novel’s motif of the library to symbolize the potential of freedom. This is expressed literally when he tries to find legal rulings that might give the children a way to escape their guardian-tormentor. Like Violet, he is stoic in using his intelligence and research abilities to find the best path toward freedom. 

Sunny Baudelaire “liked to bite things. She was an infant, and very small for her age, scarcely larger than a boot. What she lacked in size, however, she made up for with the size and sharpness of her four teeth” (3-4). Sunny’s teeth chime with Klaus’s interest in wolves and signal that, unlike an innocent fairytale character, the children are not ultimately fated to be hunted. If she likes someone, she’ll merely nibble on their hand, but Violet warns that Sunny “bites very, very hard if she doesn’t like you, or if you want to give her a bath” (32). Her biting hence acts as a plot device to externalize the mood of the Baudelaire children when their feelings are otherwise reported through speech or third-person narrative. Usually good-natured, the aptly named Sunny often talks in shrieks, yet somehow the sounds always match the situation. Her actions often are eerily appropriate, as if she’s vastly more aware of the goings-on than a typical toddler. Though her actions drive the plot less than those of Violet or Klaus, the threat on her life by Count Olaf centralizes Sunny in the plot’s conflict as it moves toward a conclusion.

Count Olaf is the chief antagonist of the story. He is a distant relative of the Baudelaires, “either a third cousin four times removed, or a fourth cousin three times removed” (14), and this near-palindrome highlights the absurdity that the Count is the only person that Mr. Poe can find to fulfill the terms of the Baudelaire estate about placing the children with a family relation.

The Count embodies a stereotypical picture of a villain:

He was very tall and very thin, dressed in a gray suit that had many dark stains on it. His face was unshaven, and rather than two eyebrows, like most human beings have, he had just one long one. His eyes were very, very shiny, which made him look both hungry and angry (20).

His lack of care in his physical appearance epitomizes the deterioration that Symbolists highlighted. This is reinforced by his criminal schemes to murder and extort money. As the antagonist, Olaf’s character development is flat. He doesn’t learn any life lessons; instead, his murderous greed is immune to setbacks, and, when his plan is spoiled by Violet, he promises he’ll return to finish what he’s started. Count Olaf is a recurring character in the A Series of Unfortunate Events, so this flat characterization will repeat cyclically as the series continues.

Mr. Poe, a banker and the executor of the Baudelaire’s will and estate, is an old friend of the family. While his name and habit of coughing are a nod to Edgar Allan Poe, his role in allowing morbid events to take place also underscores his namesake. As an honest but rule-bound professional, Poe’s efforts to oversee the family estate after the death of the senior Baudelaires instead nearly cause a second disaster. The darkly comedic element of the unfortunate events lies in the banality of Poe’s actions: As the executor of the will, he follows bureaucratic rules to the letter, and hence the children’s hamartia (often used to dramatic effect in a tragedy) is actually the most banal part of the text.

Justice Strauss is Count Olaf’s foil. She has a beautiful home next door to his dilapidated mansion, and as “a judge on the High Court” (18), she treats the law with deference rather than disregard. The contrast between them is most pronounced in the fact that Strauss and the children take an immediate liking to one another, and the children soon wish they could live with her instead of with Olaf. She helps them with their shopping and lets them peruse her extensive home library of books; in return, they help tend her garden.

As a by-the-book jurist, Strauss ignores signs that the children are abused by Olaf because each issue fails to rise, by itself, to a level that should concern the law. She hence personifies the loopholes and problems with the legal system and highlights the book’s theme of The Failure of Authorities to Protect Children. She’s oblivious to the terrible things happening next door until they’re made plain during the Count’s denouement speech at the end of his stage play. When Mr. Poe insists that she cannot legally adopt the children, she concedes the point without dispute. In her blind obedience to the law, she demonstrates, like Mr. Poe, a deference to, but not the spirit of, the laws she upholds.

Several of the actors in Count Olaf’s theatrical troupe also are confederates in his plan to swindle the children out of their fortune. They’re described not by name but by their physical traits. Olaf’s chief assistant, whose hands are replaced by hooks, seems almost as sneeringly contemptuous of the children as is his boss: These hooks form part of the collection of sharp weapons in the book, such as Sunny’s teeth. They are also a sinister anachronism that disorientates the reader in a world that, if it has computers, presumably has more advanced prosthetic technology. He terrifies Klaus in particular and hence signals the beginning of a brave character arc for Klaus as the series continues.

Two ladies with faces powdered ghostly white oversee Violet and Klaus’s costumes and makeup during the children’s transformation into characters in Olaf’s wedding play. Another performer is “extremely fat” and “look[s] like neither a man nor a woman” (41). A bald man with a long nose and a dark robe warns the children on several occasions to obey the Count or suffer grievous injury or death. These characters serve as a kind of surreal Greek chorus for the Count, one that intones predictions of the children’s dire fate and hence emphasizes the fact that the novel’s events are more suggestive of a dramatic play than the play itself. Their drunken, leering behavior echoes Olaf’s; as his squad of co-conspirators, they add to his terrifying power.