The Reptile Room

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1999

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-11

Chapters 12-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 6 Summary

The Baudelaire children are anxious for the rest of the day. After seeing a zombie film at the cinema, which they could not focus on, they go upstairs to talk alone without saying much to Uncle Monty. They spend a sleepless night together in Violet’s room, uncertain of what to do.

In the morning, Count Olaf knocks on their door and informs the children he’ll be taking them to Peru and they need to get ready to leave. The children again say that Count Olaf isn’t coming, but Count Olaf counters that plans have changed. He tells the children to go ask Uncle Monty if they don’t believe him.

The children head to the Reptile Room and call out to Uncle Monty, but he doesn’t answer. In the room, they see something lying on the floor—it’s Uncle Monty, dead and pale with two small marks under his eye, resembling a snakebite.

Chapter 7 Summary

Count Olaf appears behind the children, announcing that by the time anyone finds the body, the four of them will be long gone in Peru. The children say they’ll call the police and refuse to go anywhere with Count Olaf, but Count Olaf again threatens to harm them physically if they don’t obey and get in the Jeep. The children comply. As Count Olaf begins to pull out, the children grieve their uncle and wonder what will happen to them next—only to feel great relief as Count Olaf crashes into another arriving car.

The other driver gets out of his car and starts coughing. It’s Mr. Poe, and though his car will no longer start, he is fine. He was hurrying to deliver the children’s suitcases before they left for Peru. Count Olaf introduces himself as Stephano, Dr. Montgomery’s new assistant, and breaks the news to Mr. Poe that Dr. Montgomery is now dead, apparently from a snakebite. “Stephano” claims to know nothing about snakes, having just started, and claims he is taking the children to fetch a doctor in town to do an autopsy. Klaus interjects that he’s in fact taking them to Peru. Stephano suggests that the children are so upset over the death that they’re not making sense, and Mr. Poe tells Klaus not to interrupt adults.

The children attempt to tell Mr. Poe that Stephano is Count Olaf, but Mr. Poe assumes that they’re not thinking clearly; the trauma of losing their uncle must be bringing up memories of old traumas like being entrusted into Count Olaf’s care. The children say they can prove he’s really Count Olaf because he has the same tattoo of an eye on his ankle. Stephano consents to show them his ankle, but no tattoo appears to be on it. Mr. Poe, unconvinced as a result, has everyone return to Uncle Monty’s house, where they will call a doctor and help for Mr. Poe, as his car is broken.

Chapter 8 Summary

Klaus says he doesn’t know how Count Olaf made his tattoo disappear, but he’s still Count Olaf. Mr. Poe still doesn’t believe him. A man wearing a white coat arrives surprisingly quickly and introduces himself as Dr. Lucafont, here to do the autopsy on Dr. Montgomery. The children show him where the body is, and he begins. Stephano says when the autopsy is done, Dr. Lucafont will drive Mr. Poe to a car mechanic while he stays home with the children. Klaus protests, but Mr. Poe demands he stop being rude to Stephano. Stephano offers to take the children to the mechanic, too, if they want to go.

To try to avoid being left alone with Stephano in any capacity, Violet claims she has always wanted to ride in a doctor’s car. The adults begin to debate possible car arrangements until Dr. Lucafont returns and says he found venom from a poisonous snake called a Mamba du Mal in Dr. Montgomery’s veins. The snake is in its cage now, so Dr. Lucafont asserts that it must have escaped, killed Uncle Monty, and then let itself back in and re-locked the cage. Violet and Mr. Poe both think this sounds unlikely. Dr. Lucafont says it must have been an accident. Stephano again claims he knows nothing about snakes, so he couldn’t have had anything to do with it, plus he had nothing against Monty and no motive to kill him. As the adults continue arguing about possible car arrangements, Violet leads her siblings away.

Chapters 6-8 Analysis

The state of Uncle Monty’s corpse, which is pale and has two small marks on it resembling a snakebite, highlights how perception and reality often become blurred. It definitely appears as if a poisonous snake has killed Uncle Monty. However, the children do not allow their initial perception of the situation to rule them, suspecting instead that a snake did not really “kill” Uncle Monty and that Count Olaf is somehow behind his death. The children rely on their background knowledge of both Count Olaf and Uncle Monty, not merely on what they perceive in front of them currently. The children know that Uncle Monty was an expert on snakes and that he did not take risks with these animals, relying on knowledge to inform how he handled them. The children also know how far Count Olaf will go to obtain their fortune, and they have not forgotten that he made several menacing comments about “accidents.” Mr. Poe lacks this information. The theme The Vulnerability of Children is at work here, as Mr. Poe again trusts and prioritizes the claims of adults over those of the children. He believes the doctor’s absurd claim that the offending snake must have unlocked and relocked its own cage, and he dismisses the children’s legitimate fears as “hysterics.”

The novel devolves into absurdism in these chapters with the adults’ rambling debate over possible car-sharing and plan-of-action scenarios. The adults prioritize this discussion over any interruptions the children attempt to make, assuming that their current conversation is more important and time-sensitive than anything the children could possibly have to say. These scenes drive home how the children live within certain constraints placed on them by adults. Violet, as the oldest, is best able to recognize and navigate within those constraints; rather than attempting to interrupt again, as Klaus does, she politely makes up a story about wanting to see the inside of a doctor’s car, and later, she has the wisdom to recognize when to walk away. As the next chapter will show, she understands that to convince Mr. Poe, they will need to find evidence and proof—that is, to find something more convincing than the words of children, which hold little value for adults.

The absurd conversation among the adults also highlights the theme of The Importance of Teamwork. The adults are not necessarily useless because they are adults. It is because they fail to listen to others, especially the children, and they struggle to work together. In the kitchen, the adults allow a relatively simple question to devolve into a massive, unsolvable riddle. In contrast, Klaus and Violet complement each other in this section because, while Klaus is good at interrupting and stating things bluntly, Violet is good at being polite and playing by adult rules. Moreover, the children will soon use this time to solve a murder and assemble an impressive array of evidence to support their conclusion. Their ability to work together swiftly and efficiently, even in the face of risk and setbacks, is what makes the children—not the adults—the real heroes of the novel.