The Bad Beginning combines adventure, satire, and dark comedy into a children’s book. While the dark content seems incongruent with typical subjects of children’s literature, Daniel Handler was influenced by the grim works of writer-illustrator Edward Gorey and the macabre comedies of Roald Dahl. Dahl believed that children were able to deal with the dark side of life, and Handler delivers a heavy dose of trouble to his innocent protagonists. The Bad Beginning hence forms part of a literary landscape with its recent predecessors of transposing adult realism into fantastical comedies appropriate for children.

Handler’s texts include a lot of wordplay. The title of the series to which The Bad Beginning belongs, A Series of Unfortunate Events, contains a pun: It provides a prolepsis for the unhappy endings in the texts but is also a metafictional reference to each book as an “unfortunate event.” The first book contains 13 numbered chapters, and the series contains 13 books; the number 13 itself signifies unfortunate events. 

The Bad Beginning’s chapters are filled with references to the artistic movement known as Symbolism. This style, centered in France during the mid-to-late 1800s, used words or painted images as symbols that represented the corruption and decadence of life and the dreamed-of ideals of something better in the afterlife.