Cultural References & Literary Allusions
- "Elliot" and "Beverly", the aliases Violet and Klaus use when disguised as weird freaks are those of twin brothers, both played by Jeremy Irons, in the David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers.
- Klaus refers to Joseph Merrick (incorrectly naming him "John Merrick") when discussing the cruelty of freak shows.
- The Caligari Carnival is an allusion to the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
- The Hunchback named Hugo is an allusion to The Hunchback of Notre Dame written by Victor Hugo.
- At one point, Sunny uses the word "Dragnet" to refer to the police. Dragnet is the name of an old police-based show.
- The image for Chapter Seven depicting Madame Lulu's broken crystal ball shows several darkened images, presumably of Lemony Snicket (one is on a cover page of The Daily Punctilio, with a headline beginning with "Snicket"), a topographic map of Mortmain Mountains, a menu from Café Salmonella, a boarding pass for The Prospero, and a document featuring the V.F.D. logo.
- "Plath Pass" in the map of the mountains may allude to poet Sylvia Plath.
Read more about this topic: The Carnivorous Carnival
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or literary:
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“When appearance and reality coincide, philosophy and literary criticism find themselves with nothing to say.”
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