Alice in Wonderland Analysis

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Furthermore, right from Alice’s entrance into the story world, Carroll showers us with a rainstorm of imagery and scene description that the real world was wholly missing. As Alice arrives to the bottom of the rabbit-hole, Carroll uses descriptive language to illustrate the images we visualize while reading:

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage,

not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along

the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains. (Carroll 4)

Whereas the real world’s only imagery was the fact that Alice was sitting by the bank on a hot day, the story world obtains color, measurements, and vivid description. He continues using descriptive language all throughout the story-world plot to enhance our engagement with the novel, and to differentiate the two worlds altogether.

Along with the characters, and the authors use of language and imagery that differentiates the two worlds, his exaggeration of Alice’s outlandish experiences in the story-world as a whole are enough chaotic to be the sole difference between the two realms. Alice grows both literally and metaphorically in this world as she drinks and eats unidentified substances. Her tears are able to form an entire body of water beneath, forcing her and those around her to swim. She attends a mad tea party uninvited, plays croquet with a Queen, and attends a trial regarding missing tarts. It is these bizarre experiences that categorize the story-world as the story-world.

The two worlds are of obvious different dimensions: one of conventionality, and the other of mayhem. However, though they are disparate, they are not unconnected. Elements of the story world blend into those of the real world, just as elements of the real world blend into those of the story world. The overlap between the two worlds allows the readers to both anticipate future events, and feel safe in knowing the real world hasn’t ultimately disappeared. Simultaneously, though, they create what could be called a “blur” within the storyline.

While The White Rabbit is a character that clearly belongs in the story-world, he is initially discovered in the real world, illustrating this evident blur between the two worlds. The rabbit itself is what spurs Alice’s curiosity at the start, and also drags it on throughout the rest of the book, making it difficult to label when, precisely, Alice had entered the story world. Though it seems as though it was once she fell down the rabbit-hole, it is odd to think that her real surroundings would include a talking, pink-eyed rabbit.

Furthermore, the fact that the book incepted with Alice’s disgruntlement towards her sister’s conversation-less book is another aspect of the story-world hidden behind reality. This is an example of irony, considering that Carroll’s book itself is a myriad of countless peculiar conversations- at least, those of the story-world, that Alice felt her sister was missing.

Likewise, there are many aspects of the real world hidden within the story-world dimension. For example, her rants about what she has learned in school during her lengthy fall down the rabbit-hole are quite characteristic of the real world, yet also just nonsensical enough to portray the fogginess and blur between the two worlds altogether. She cries, “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time? I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think— ‘) (Carroll 2) While she talks about characteristics of what she has learned in real life, they are silly and incoherent enough to mark the transition into the story-world.

Moreover, her real life cat Dinah, was mentioned countless times within the story-world. One example of her mentioning her cat within the story-world was to a talking mouse. She says, “And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah: I think you’d take a fancy to cats if you could only see her.” (Carroll 11) This portrays a sense of reminiscence. Though Alice is completely submerged into a new world, she doesn’t forget the aspects of her real world, such as her cat.

Furthermore, Alice’s fleeting rational throughout the story-world is an aspect that she dragged from home. For, it was definitely not obtained within the madness of the dreamlike realm. For example, her motives to check whether a specific drink was labelled with “poison,” before her decision to drink it, though weak, endorse her subconscious thoughts about home, and what she would have done within an orderly space: “It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry: ‘no, Ill look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether its marked ‘poison’ or not.” (15) Additionally, the way that Alice responded to the bedlam of the story-world characters was reminiscent of a sense of authority that she could have mimicked from her elders back home (who we don’t actually know anything about.) She would consistently remind the characters when they are being rude, or doing things out of the ordinary, as if anything about the story-world was ordinary at all.

The doors to the story world close before our very eyes, just as Alice opens hers. Carroll has made it clear to us by the end of the novel that this story world was nothing more than a pigment of Alice’s imagination: her dream. He wrote, “’Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!’ said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about.” (189) By including the idea that all of Alice’s adventures were a dream, Carroll made it possible to propagate her escapades through a source that everyone is familiar with. In fact, the first to be influenced by Alice’s trance, aside from the countless readers, was her sister: “So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew had but to open them again and all would change to dull reality.” (192) Just like that, little Alice’s dreams impacted those of a grown woman, as well as her dreams are able to impact all of ours. Thus, while there were two different worlds depicted in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” we forgot to account for the third: our very own. For Alice’s adventures, in some shape or form, have spurred at least a bit of a reaction through the thoughts of every reader to pick up the book. “At first we thought of fantasy as fun, albeit somewhat shallow, genre. We thought that it lacked the