I Mean Really, It’s a Children’s Book.

December 3, 2009

Filed under Carl K.

leave a response

My inspiration of this post comes from my comment on Kristin’s post, Do Annotations Ruin a Reader’s Own Discovery Process?

And so I shall like to start off by stating that over the years, there has been many scholars that have observed and annotated Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. To me, quite frankly, I personally don’t like it all that much. Here’s an excerpt from my comment on Kristin’s post, telling how I feel about it:

[…]First off, there were WAY too many of them. Pretty much to the point where they would totally distract you from the story, which is kind of irritating to me. And second, most of them went into GREAT length in detail, and I think some were just plain irrelevant[…]

I just wonder why would we ever need to go into that much depth? I mean really, it’s a children’s book. Carroll might have thrown around some symbols and moral, within the story, but I highly doubt he meant to put that much symbolism in. And I’ll have to agree with Kristin again, we are left little to ‘discover’ or ‘note’ anything within since mostly everything has been annotated. The annotations have left nothing for readers to analyze, and those who are avid readers can’t enjoy the book anymore.

We should have listened to Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton. He pleaded to us that if Alice is over-analyzed, the story would dull and uninteresting. So, my opinion is, we probably shouldn’t have read The Annotated Alice, because I feel that we couldn’t learn all that much from it. I liked the way we analyzed Lord of the Flies, because we were improving our research and analysis skills that will help us in the future.