Every parent wants their children to be surrounded by the best of everything this world has to offer and to grow up to be well educated and instinctively know basic moral rights and wrongs. But sometimes protecting them with the goodness of this world can do them more harm than good. Daniel Handler seems to think that children are not particularly fragile and can tolerate an unhappy ending. He did just that in his novel, The Bad Beginning, the first novel in the Series of Unfortunate Events. The writing style unmistakably creates a dark and terrible world for its characters. It begins with the three siblings Violet, Klaus and Sunny who experience the great pain of the sudden death of their parents. The children, now orphans, must go to live with their distant relative, Count Olaf, who has no intention of treating them well. Readers learn early on that children will face more challenges on their own. Since then, Handler considers all authority figures to be incompetent and are often blinded by Count Olaf's plans. Despite the uncomfortable stream of traumatic adversity that children have faced, Daniel Handler's The Bad Beginning challenges young readers to think objectively through the combination of the use of narrative styles and thought-provoking moral messages. Interestingly, A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Bad Beginning has Lemony Snicket on the cover as the author and while reading the book readers discovered that he is also the narrator. But the book was actually written by Daniel Handler and Lemony Snicket is more or less a character he invented. Consequently, turning this novel into a complicated blend of first-person narrative and third-person omniscient narrative. Johan Kullenbok wrote "The Shape Shifting Storyteller in Lemony Snick... middle of paper... misleading readers about the role the narrator plays, Handler also imposes the idea that the adults in the novel are not the adults" as the adults in the real world. It shows their characters as useless and having no real power to protect Violet, Klaus, and Sunny from Count Olaf. This will challenge young readers' natural expectations that adults are there to help siblings. Finally, Handler presents the children, who are supposed to be the good guys, as having questionable moral codes to once again cause readers to abandon their belief that a character cannot be both good and bad. The example above shows that Klaus stole from Judge Strauss to help his brothers escape the evil Count Olaf. The host refrains from explicitly telling readers his opinions to let them think and decide for themselves whether the character's action is right or wrong.