Through the Looking Glass

This book is very similar to Alice in Wonderland, but this time, she went through the looking glass. Alice, who I found out is only 7 years old and six months, is still a logical person in an unlogical world, but the more I think about it, this book makes more sense from its nonsense than the other book did.

You know how a paragraph appears backwards when you hold it up to the mirror? Well, this book is just like that: not written to be read backwards(a poem that Alice-and the reader- reads in this land is, however), but events that begin with the end. For example, the white queen (like in chess-there's red and white chess people here) screamed that she was bleeding from her broche pricking her finger, pricked her finger, and then began bleeding. Weird, right? But it makes perfect sense when you think about it in context with the mirror. At the beginning of the novel, Alice is speaking to one of her cats about what things are like in the place through the looking glass, foreshadowing the types of events, such as the one above, that happen. I'm only about halfway through the novel, and I can already give plenty more examples.

One of the main differences I have noticed so far between this novel and the other one is that the characters Alice encounters make more sense as well. For example, Alice is often unclear in her requests/conversations, even though the common reader understands them perfectly. When the character responds, however, they take her thought literally, word for word. You then realize, as the reader, that when you think about the literal construction of her statement, she did say it incorrectly. The more I read, the more I encounter this. Therefore, the big question is if Alice is still the logical person, or if she has "converted" to fit into an illogical world that's beginning to make logical sense?

Wonderland

For those of you who have seen Disney's "Alice in Wonderland", you get a pretty good representation, give or take a few things, of what Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is about. Yeah, it's extremely weird, but a great piece of literature. Alice, the protagonist, has dreaming down to an art. Have you ever had a dream where (after studying a bunch of subjects before bed, for example) all the subject matter is jumbled into one massive problem that you just can't solve, and you freak out and think you're going to fail? Well, that's this book in a nut shell. Literally, eveything she has learned becomes mixed up, like the recitations or history, and nothing makes logical sense. Yet, everything seems so real!

The imagery in this book was phenomenal. Everything, as silly as it may seem, was described so well that I honestly got 'lost' in the book, more so than in any poem or other novel I read. I remember at one point, when I was reading about the Mad Hatter's tea party etc, I actually became slightly dizzy picturing everything. (Stupid, I know.) And as far as the reader knows, Alice is actually living in this crazy world with disapeering cats and smoking catipillars, until the end of the novel when she wakes up. The book finishes with her sister wondering what will happen with Alice when she goes through the looking glass, the second book about Alice.

In a way, this book sends a good message to people who don't think outside of the box a lot. Alice is a very sensible person in a world that makes no sense whatsoever, but when she comes out of Wonderland, she has a new perspective on things (so it can be inferred with what little she says after her awakening). Therefore, maybe we should "take a trip to Wonderland" in (day)dreams in order to get a reality check.


The actual meaning behind the book, however, is more of a protest than an inspiration. "Carroll" was a mathematician at an Oxford Catholic college. He wrote this book protesting imaginary numbers, symbolic algebra, and many other radical changes in the mthematic world at the time. Makes sense, right? Here's the website if you want to read more.
http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_10.html