Salad

I have finally finished the twelfth book in A Series of Unfortunate Events. The thirteenth and last will be coming out on Friday 13th of October. No it's not a coincidence.
As the series begins, (and indeed, the whole way along) the author implores you to put down the book you are reading, and go look for something that won't keep you up all night weeping. Melodramatic? Probably. And for the first half (or so) of these books one doesn't find much to be overly distressed about. The children are always unlucky, and hardly ever happy, but one expects a protagonist to have seemingly insurmountable obstacles to overcome. If the whole thing's a lovely picnic, then one might as well go to sleep now. But there is a subtle shift around halfway through, when the children start to question whether the things they've had to do to stay one step ahead of the villain (lying, tricking, helping to set fire to an establishment) are turning them into villains themselves. They had very good reasons for all that they did, but still . . .
The most disturbing thing is that the author makes no attempt to clean up this problem for the reader. In many/most stories there are good guys and there are bad guys; you root for the heros and boo the crooks. (Unless of course, you know the protagonists are crooks and are cheering for them anyway, cf. Oceans Eleven) Any subtlety is derived from trying to figure out if seemingly ambiguous characters are actually good or bad. Snicket, however, does not allow us this comfortable and simplistic view. The Baudelaires are the protagonists, our sympathies are with them the whole way - yet they often do things that we (and they) are not sure are the right things to do. Their morally questionable (and often deliberate) actions result in pain, devestation, and occasionally death. They didn't intend for all that to happen, but it still did, and they wonder exactly how much of the blame they should be wearing. Not knowing if your hero is actually good creates a far more uncomfortable sensation than merely watching them go through terrible things. All this in spite of our awareness (should we admit it) that we are not wholly good, that we do things we are ashamed of, that we hurt and damage other people sometimes permanently. To paraphrase one of Snickets characters, people are not just 'noble' or 'villainous'; they are more like a salad: lots of things mixed up together. This is a reality that many have avoided, because it isn't comfortable. It's much easier to slice the world down the middle and plop oneself on the 'good' side. It takes courage to look in the mirror and see not what one wants to, but what is really there. Yes, we are the children of Heaven. But let us not in our arrogance and fear forget that in each of our hearts lurk the deep places of Hell.