Hotel Denouement
From ''The Lemony Snicket Wiki''
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[edit] General Description
It was the hotel in which The Penultimate Peril took place. The imposing structure stood on the edge of a lake, seemingly leaning forward as though it could fall into the lake at any moment. All of the letters and numbers that decorated the outside of the building were forged backwards. This was because when leaning over the lake, the water shows the reflection of the structure with the labels correctly spelled. There was a domed roof over the main lobby, and embedded at the very top of the dome was a large grandfather clock, whose loud ringing at every hour is reminiscent of the word: Wrong! It is called the "stuff of legend", according to Lemony Snicket.
[edit] The Grandfather Clock
This clock is built into the top of the Hotel Denouement, and it is one of the attractions that brings regular people to the hotel, and one of the features that keeps V.F.D. members returning, outside of the Dewey Decimal System Organization. The description given by Lemony Snicket in The Penultimate Peril is thus:
The clock in the lobby of the Hotel Denouement is the stuff of legend, a phrase which here means "very famous for being very loud." It is located it the very center of the ceiling, at the very top of the dome, and when the clock announces the hour, its bells clang throughout the entire building, making an immense, deep noise that sounds like a cetain word being uttered once for each hour. At this particular moment, it was three o'clock, and everyone in the hotel could hear teh booming ring of the enormous bells of the clock, uttering the word three times in succession: Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
[edit] Employees
Working as the managers for the Hotel Denouement are both Frank and Ernest Denouement. They take care of the maintenance of the building as well as taking care of the clients that occupy the building. Dewey Denoument, Frank and Ernest's triplet brother, is a sub-sub-librarian, and caretaker of the clock inside of the hotel. For this reason, he is not seen much, and many people believe that Frank and Ernest are twins and do not have a brother. Even Count Olaf was surprised to discover that Dewey was not a child's tale.
Hal is found being employed by the manager brothers in The Penultimate Peril. He works in the Indian food restaurant despite the fact that he's not very good at cooking that type of food, according to Sunny. He's still spouting out his infamous phrase, "I didn't know this was a sad occasion." He still doesn't get his preferred response, though, which would be "The world is quiet here."
[edit] Hotel Organization
This hotel was built with nine floors, organized in the format of a library. Violet Baudelaire, Klaus Baudelaire, and Sunny Baudelaire point out several times that it would take a catalog to travel within will full knowledge of your whereabouts. Each floor contains only clients and rooms that are themed for topics that would fit that floor's number range. For more information, please see the Dewey Decimal System.
[edit] Rooms that are mentioned in Hotel Denouement
This is a list of all of the rooms that are listed in The Penultimate Peril, the only book that the Hotel is featured in, along with the proper translation of what the room number means in the Dewey Decimal System. I will also list what purpose the room served in the book, and a small explantion of why it was used there.
000 - Employees Quarters - 000 is Generalities : Because it is a hotel, all of the employees are there to serve customers, and therefore they are general help.
025 - The Laundry Room - 025 is Library Operations : This name seems to be attributed to the fact that the sugar bowl is supposed to fall into the room via the outside chute. This could point to the fact that more covert operations could possibly have taken place in that room in the past.
101 - Reception Desk - 101 is the Theory of Philosophy : This number was used because of the cannotation of the number 101 as being a number used to refer to the basic level of an academic class subject. However, this was also used because "Theory of Philosophy" means, essentially, "the idea of truth or knowledge." The receptionist's desk, where you can find knowledge of activites and available rooms in a building, is loosely associated with this description.
118 - Elevator - 118 is Force and Energy : This makes sense for very obvious reasons. Force and energy are two of the basic properties that allow an elevator to run properly.
121 - The closet where the Harpoon was kept - 121 is Epistemology; Theories of Knowledge : It is not clear what is supposed to be kept in the room, but it has been said that it is used as a closet.
123 - The Green wooden floors of the lobby - 123 is Determinism and Self-Determinism - Events are pre-determined by preceeding events or laws; the actions of a self are determined by itself : This was chosen because when one walks across any floor it is usually with purpose. Whether or not you are heading somewhere to complete a task for yourself of for someone else, the decision by either you or someone else has to be made for you to do it. Sometimes even events determine where you are going, and not people.
126 - A large, wooden bench in the lobby - 126 is Humankind : This number was used because sitting on a bench means that you may meet and befriend those whom you did not previously know. Also, because only Humans sit on benches in parks and other such public places.
131 - The Enormous Fountain in the lobby - 131 is Occult Methods for Achieving Well-Being : This is used because it describes the habit of people dropping coins into a fountain and making various wishes.
152 - Grand Piano in the lobby - 152 is Perception, Movement, Emotions, Drives : These are all things that describe not only what inspires the creation of music, but how it affects an audience was well.
165 - The room in which the Baudelaires were stored before the trial - 165 is Fallacies and Sources of Error : this is also one of those numbers that is used specifically because of the characters, as it is made plain by the orphans that there is not much in the room at all.
168 - The Newsstand - 168 is Argument and Persuasion : This is labeled so because printing articles in a newspaper is for the purpose of presenting a particular argument to the readers with the purpose of persuasion to a specific viewpoint. Exempting editorials, of course.
175 - The Concierge Desk - 175 is the Ethics of Recreation and Leisure : This chosen obviously because it is the job of a concierge to provide anything that the guests might need for enjoying their stay at the hotel.
174 - A room where a banker was staying - 174 is Economic and Professional Ethics : This is the room where a banker "picked up the phone only to find no one on the line". It is not indicated whether or not this banker was Arthur Poe, although later it is revealed that he was indeed staying in that room.
176 - Wall by which a woman was screaming a man's name over and over - 176 is the Ethics of Sex and Reproduction : Ethics is the study of values relating to Human conduct, so I imagine that the wall was only labeled this because the woman was standing under it and screaming. Otherwise, it would denote that any interaction between couples should take place at the wall.
178 - The Coffee Shop - 178 is Ethics of Consumption : this is the coffee shop where "a villain requested sugar in his coffee, was immediately thrown to the floor so a waitress could see if he had a tatoo on his ankle, and then received an apology and a free slice of rhubarb pie for all his trouble".
296 - The room occupied by a Rabbi - 296 is Judaism : Because a Rabbi generally falls under the umbrella of a faction of relgion branched off of Judaism. This is also the room in which "a volunteer suddenly realized that the Hebrew language is read from right to left rather than left to right".
371 - The room filled with Educational Guests - 371 is School Management; Special Education : Because the people in that room turned out to be the orphans' old teachers and principal from The Austere Academy, this number fits perfectly.
547 - Room dedicated to Organic Chemistry - 547 is Organic chemistry : Although the chemist in costume int he book was a disguise for Colette, there is no doubt that there is a chemistry lab in the Hotel Denouement.
594 - A room containing tanks of tropical fish - 594 is Mollusca and Molluscoidea : the room where a family sat "unaware that underneath a cushion of a sofa in the lobby was the doily for which they had been searching for nine years"
613 - The sauna - 613 is the Promotion of Health : Some believe that saunas are for relaxation, but other believe that sitting in a sauna can cure sickness and illness. Both descriptions fall under this categrory, particularly because stress is a large catalyst of many medical conditions.
674 - The room filled with Associates in the Lumber Industry - 674 is Lumber Processing, Wood Products : This is where Sir and Charles are staying in the Hotel.
697 - Room where the controls for heating, ventilation, and air conditions are kept - 697 is Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning : This is rather self explanatory. There were no tricks or metaphors in this description at all.
786 - The room in which a concertina is available - 786 is Keyboard and Other Instruments : It is implied that this is a general music room available for practice and stocked with spare instruments.
792 - The Theatre - 792 is Stage Presentations : Again, self-explanatory.
954 - The Indian restaurant - 954 is General History of Asia, South Asia, India : Although a general category is a stange place to put something specific like cuisine, the connection through the indian food is made quite clearly.
999 - The Astronomy Observatory - 999 is Extraterrestial : Because many watch the skies for foreign signs of life in space, this number was chosen for the observatory.
