The End (Lemony Snicket)

In my humble opinion, the best book in the series. We finally find out for certain who Beatrice was, Olaf does his one noble act, and the Baudelaires finally grow up.

I think VFD represents the adult world and its choices, which are in the end, moral choices. Children are taken out from their family and induced into VFD whether they want it or not (and usually they don't), but it's their choices that will make them volunteers or villains (or more likely, something in between). When Oppenheimer made the atomic bomb, he used his great intelligence and leadership skills to create the best bomb possible. When the Baudelaires burned down the Hotel Denouement, they were fulfilling their mission and giving the best signal possible to VFD that their safe place had been breached. But their actions had grave consequences. Oppenheimer, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, says "now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds". The Baudelaires may have caused the death of almost every secondary character in the series.

Ishmael, on the other hand, had decided to withdraw from the world completely, and thought he could protect his followers from having to make moral decisions. This course of action also proved fraught with unintended consequences, and in the end he wasn't able to hold the world with it's ambiguous moral choices at bay.

In this universe, salvation comes not from withdrawing from the ambiguous moral choices, but from seeking moral knowledge. As in the Garden of Eden, the snake brings his gift - the fruit of knowledge of good and evil.

In Snicket's book-centric universe, it's not surprising that the snake's name is Ink, because moral knowledge comes in great part from ink - from the printed word.

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Quotes:

Call me Ish. (Ishmael)

It depends on how you look at it.

If you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure, you will end up without any peers whatsoever, and the trick is to succumb to enough pressure that you do not drive your peers away, but not so much that you end up in a situation in which you are dead or otherwise uncomfortable.

I've never known a Baudelaire that didn't rock the boat. (Ishmael)

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done. -- Francis William Bourdillon

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself. -- Philip Larkin