Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is adolescent in the sense provided by Julia Kristeva–it offers critical insight into the breakdown of categories that support representational and ethical certainties. The ethical stance of its author, Daniel Handler, is complicated–urgent, resonant, distressing–caught in the devious irony endemic to metafictional play and to the sensibility of Generation X. Such irony casts light too on literary criticism's changing treatment of the critical subspecialty of children's literature as well as on its renewed but uneasy interest in ethics as revision of past humanism. A Series offers an ethics of practice, one that recognizes its dependence on the impulses it critiques. Just as the books' postmodern orphans improvise in the face of menace that doesn't stop, Handler's irony pictures a world where ethics can never be more than a provisional entente negotiating impossible ideals.