The Wide Window

Violet, at 14 years old, is the oldest of the three Baudelaire children and one of the story’s protagonists. She is an intelligent and resourceful girl who thinks that “inventing things [is] the greatest joy in life” (17-18). Instead of accepting that their food at Josephine’s will always be cold because of Josephine’s fear of the stove, for instance, Violet immediately sets about trying to invent an alternative method of heating the food. She’s the one who thinks of a way to end the brunch with Captain Sham early, before the guardianship papers can be signed and devises a plan to attract a rescuer’s attention when Josephine and the children are stranded on a boat in Lake Lachrymose, highlighting The Resilience and Resourcefulness of Children in the Face of Adult Failures as a central theme in the novel.

Handler characterizes Violet as kind-hearted, polite, and loving toward her younger siblings. When Mr. Poe offers the children a bag of peppermints, Violet thanks him politely and does not remind him that all three Baudelaires are allergic to peppermint. She graciously accepts a doll from Josephine, even though she does not like dolls. She later gives Sunny the doll to chew on, knowing it will go to better use. Despite everything she has already suffered in life, Violet is a deeply moral person. She believes in being grateful for Josephine’s efforts on their behalf, even when those efforts do not actually result in their happiness, and she grieves deeply when Josephine appears to have died by suicide. Although Violet is capable of morally ambiguous behavior when pushed into extreme situations—stealing Olaf’s sailboat in order to rescue Josephine, for instance, or giving her younger siblings a food she knows they are allergic to—these choices are always a result of pragmatically weighing her options and deciding in favor of the greater moral good, even when a few compromises have to be made to reach this end.

Klaus, age 12, is the middle Baudelaire sibling and one of the story’s protagonists. While Violet is an inventor, Klaus is an inveterate reader with a vast storehouse of knowledge on many subjects. He also enjoys conducting his own research in order to gather new information. Klaus is the one who notices the errors in Josephine’s supposed suicide note and deduces that Josephine wrote the note under duress from Count Olaf. He is also able to find the note’s secret coded message and direct his siblings to Curdled Cave. When Josephine refuses to leave the cave with the Baudelaires, Klaus remembers her fear of realtors and leverages it to convince her to leave Curdled Cave, evidencing his quick thinking even under duress.

Klaus’s generosity and genuine concern for his siblings’ happiness underscores their strong sibling bond, which Handler frames as their most valuable asset against the many challenges they face. Klaus gives Violet his toy train to take apart and study, leaving him only Sunny’s rattle as a toy, and he shares his coat with both of his sisters during the hurricane. Like Violet, he is willing to engage in morally questionable behavior if it is in the service of a greater good—stealing the sailboat in order to save Josephine, for example, or deliberately frightening Josephine with the prospect of realtors. Also like Violet, he is determined and brave. Even the danger, chaos, and discomfort of the hurricane swirling around him in Josephine’s library is not enough to dissuade Klaus from the task of decoding Josephine’s note.

Sunny Baudelaire, the youngest of the siblings, is the third of the book’s protagonists. She is still an infant, not yet able to walk on her own or speak clearly enough to be understood by others. This latter quality is the subject of one of the book’s running jokes, as narrator Lemony Snicket often breaks in to interpret Sunny’s babbling on the reader’s behalf, assigning her simple, nonsensical words—words like “Schu!” (23), “Poch!” (64), and “Gind!” (89)—complex meanings like “Please don’t make us live with this evil man!” Sunny’s chief joy in life is biting things with her four sharp baby teeth.

Handler positions Sunny as a full participant in the novel’s action, with qualities unusual or impossible for a child of her age, which adds to the heightened reality of Handler’s world. For example, Sunny steers the sailboat on Lake Lachrymose “as if she had been a tiller-mover all her life” (163). The hyperbolic portrayal of her abilities is one of the book’s fantasy elements and contributes to its humorous tone. Like her siblings, Sunny is clever and brave. She goes without hesitation into the scary shack on the dock to retrieve the keys from the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender. She leads her older siblings into the frightening Curdled Cave. In the novel’s conclusion, Sunny is the one who reveals Count Olaf’s disguise by biting Captain Sham’s prosthetic leg.

Josephine is a very distant relative of the Baudelaire children, but she prefers for them to call her “Aunt Josephine.” She is an older woman with pale skin and a bun of white hair, and she lives alone in a strange, towering house on the edge of a cliff overlooking Lake Lachrymose. Josephine is a representative of the well-intentioned adults in the Baudelaires’ world: She wants the best for the children, but her capacity to give it to them is sharply limited by her own failings. As a person ruled by her own worry, she provides the narrative with a cautionary tale about The Necessity of Confronting One’s Fears.

Handler frames Josephine’s cowardice, in part, as a result of her grief. She has kind and generous impulses, but the loss of her husband, Ike, leaves her unable to meaningfully engage with the world. She tells the children that she does not want them to feel lonely like she does, and that this is why—despite having always been too frightened to have children—she has agreed to give them a home. Her preparation of a room for them and purchase of a toy for each child demonstrate a sincere intention to make the Baudelaires happy and comfortable, and she expresses excitement about having them around to keep her company.

Although well-intentioned, Josephine’s anxiety prevents her from getting to know the children for who they really are. Her defining characteristic is her exaggerated and absurd list of fears: doorknobs, radiators, stoves, realtors, and so on. These fears prevent her from actually offering the children a stable and welcoming home—the house is cold and drafty, Josephine will only serve cold food, and she prevents the children from accessing modern technology like cars and the telephone. Josephine, like many of the adults in the books in this series, is gullible, grasping for the most emotionally convenient explanation rather than the reality happening in front of her. Her loneliness makes her vulnerable to Olaf’s scheme to court her as Captain Sham. She resists the children’s accurate observations about the man, choosing instead to believe that they are imagining things because of their past traumas. 

Josephine’s fears also make her selfish like most of the other adults in A Series of Unfortunate Events. When Olaf directly threatens her, she saves herself and leaves the children alone, believing that she has died by suicide, to face the villain without her. Ultimately, her choices place her—and the children she is supposed to be protecting—in great danger. In contrast to Josephine, the Baudelaire siblings push past their fears in order to do what must be done. In Chapter 10, Violet makes this explicitly clear when she tells Josephine that “We’re all afraid” (160) and then lists the frightening events she and her siblings have recently needed to face: Olaf’s appearance in the grocery store, Josephine’s apparent suicide, and sailing across the lake in a hurricane. “But that didn’t stop us,” she says pointedly (160).

Count Olaf is the antagonist of The Wide Window and each of the 13 novels in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Handler characterizes him as an evil and mercenary person determined get his hands on the Baudelaire children’s inheritance. His physical description helps to establish his role as a mock-gothic villain: He’s tall and thin, with long, boney fingers and a prominent unibrow. He often adopts disguises in order to get close to the children—amusingly clumsy disguises that the Baudelaires easily see through but that completely fool their adult guardians. In The Wide Window, Olaf first appears in Chapter 3, disguised as “Captain Sham.” The name “Sham” provides a humorous signal that this supposed sailor is not what he seems, but Josephine is immediately deceived by the sailor hat, eye patch, and prosthetic leg Olaf has adopted.

Olaf is a boastful, sneering, and manipulative villain who taunts his victims with threats and stresses their helplessness to thwart him. The comically obvious ways in which Olaf manipulates the adults who are supposed to protect the Baudelaires adds to the heightened, theatrical quality of the novel. As Captain Sham, Olaf charms Josephine with clichéd compliments—pretending to believe that Josephine is young Violet’s sister, for instance—and appeals to her sympathy by pretending to have lost a leg to the same leeches that killed her husband. The generally fearful Josephine’s positive reaction to Olaf—who, unlike doorknobs and the stove, actually represents real danger—points to Handler’s use of irony. The failings of the adults in the novel—both tragic and comic—reinforce the Baudelaires as the heroes of the tale.