The Bad Beginning

The Baudelaire children grow up in a house with a very large library, “a room filled with thousands of books on nearly every subject” (3). The library is a marvelous educational resource, and the children—Klaus in particular—read widely from its volumes. Sadly, the library is destroyed in a fire, and the children move to a house with no books whatsoever. The sharp contrast between these two houses’ educational materials is a metonym for the goodness of the Baudelaire parents and the badness of Count Olaf.

The children discover that their new neighbor, Justice Strauss, has her own large library that they may visit. This library provides them with the information that they use to defeat Count Olaf’s evil scheme. This library, like their home library, signals both a sense of care and abundance. It also symbolizes the power of knowledge and the freedom it can provide.

Count Olaf’s house is dark, dirty, cluttered with unwashed dishes and empty wine bottles, and festooned with drawings of eyeballs. Its owner, himself unkempt and grimy, matches closely the house’s appearance. The dirt, smell, darkness, and disorder externalize the mind of Count Olaf. His theatre troupe visits often, and its selfishly drunken members fit the decor. The house, in short, is a major symbol of evil in the story: a building that, in its decrepitude, closely matches the Count’s nature. It is hence a synecdoche for the corrupt and decadent world decried in the Symbolist movement.