Snicket file
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| The Snicket File | |
| First mentioned | The Hostile Hospital |
|---|---|
| Possessed by | unknown — last seen with Count Olaf, though page 13 possessed by the Baudelaires |
The Snicket File is an important file of documents from the A Series of Unfortunate Events children's series.
Suggested in The Slippery Slope to have been written by Jacques, Kit and Lemony Snicket, it is first mentioned in The Hostile Hospital, in which it is also referred to as the Baudelaire file. Count Olaf wants to obtain and destroy it because it supposedly has enough evidence to put him and his associates in jail. The Baudelaire orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire also want the file, believing it to contain information about themselves and the whereabouts of a possible survivor of the fire that destroyed their family home.
[edit] Contents
The Snicket File has thirteen pages and is said to contain charts, maps, and photographs. It has also been described by characters in the series as "the file about the Snicket fires" and "the Baudelaire file". The thirteenth page features a photograph of Jacques Snicket, a man facing away from the camera (very probably Lemony Snicket), and Mr. and Mrs. Baudelaire (and, out of sight, the photographer) standing in front of 667 Dark Avenue in cold weather, accompanied by the text "Because of the evidence discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown."
The contents of page nine, and the rest of the pages of the file (with the possible exception of one page of Lemony Snicket's planned opening sentences for The Bad Beginning, which was instructed to be placed in the Baudelaire file), are unknown, as is which fire the text refers to. The Baudelaire siblings suspected it was the fire that destroyed their home; it may also have referred to the fire that destroyed the Quagmire home, which Quigley Quagmire survived while his siblings believed him and their parents to be dead. It could also refer to many other fires, including those allegedly lit by Lemony Snicket himself, which he claims in The Slippery Slope were really lit by Count Olaf, or a fire that destroyed the Snicket's home, if there was one.
In The End, Snicket writes: "Kit Snicket's story of the Great Unknown made the Baudelaires see at last that their parents had gone forever into the great unknown, and that they would be orphans forever, too." This implies that after The End the Baudelaires are pretty sure that their parents have died in the fire and probably correct in believing so.
[edit] Events
After learning from the keeper of the Library of Records at Heimlich Hospital, Hal, that there is information about themselves in "the file about the Snicket fires", the Baudelaire orphans attempt to retrieve the file from the hospital's Library of Records. However, they only retrieve the last page - page 13 - which was accidentally left behind when the rest was removed for an official investigation of unknown nature. The Baudelaires interpret the page they obtain as indicating that one of their parents survived the fire that supposedly , and this knowledge motivates them until The Slippery Slope.
In the The Slippery Slope, Count Olaf is given the Snicket File by the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard, in reward for having burnt down Caligari Carnival. He, they, and Esmé Squalor retreat into his tent to read it and discuss its contents - sending away his associates, who he did not want to learn the file's secrets. The file is later revealed to name the location of the last safe place for V.F.D. Afterwards, it vanishes from the narrative and does not appear again; it is assumed to either still be in Count Olaf's possession or to have been destroyed as he intended. It has no significance to the story after these events occur; in The Grim Grotto, Snicket writes that "For quite some time, the Baudelaires had thought [the Snicket File] meant that one of their parents was alive after all, but now they were almost certain it meant no such thing." It is possible that the "important pieces of paper" blowing around in the Hinterlands, as mentioned by Lemony Snicket in "The Grim Grotto" were the Snicket file. Or, the papers could have been pages from the Quagmire notebooks, which were ripped apart by a harpoon gun in The Vile Village.
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