Mourning A Series of Unfortunate Events

Through an analysis of the popular, yet controversial children’s book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, this paper considers the rhetorical construction of mourning and its relationship to post-9/11 discourses about grief. This essay argues that the series challenges conventionalized understandings of mourning as externalizations of preemption, prevention, readiness, and revenge. Rather, mourning occurs by way of coming to terms with one’s specific, personal, and perhaps publicly untranslatable relationship with loss, and by risking the continued propensity for hurt that comes with social and political participation--with all lived experience.