What would you answer if you were faced with this question? Would you be like Alice and say you’re not quite sure? Or would you reply with a simple first and last name? How do you define yourself? Do you define yourself by what you do, what you say, your ethnicity or religion, your species and gender, your personality, your likes and dislikes? There are so many different responses to a question like this.

The definition of a person according to Dictionary.Com does not even give a clear answer to these questions. A person can either be “an individual human being, especially with reference to his or her social relationships and behavioral patterns as conditioned by the culture.” or “the actual self or individual personality of a human being” or “the body of a living human being, sometimes including the clothes being worn.”

So, you could either respond with, “My name is blank, I am the daughter of blankity blank, the sister to blank and blank, friend to blank blank blank, and live in a blank culture.” Or you could respond with, “My name is blank, I am adjective, adjective, adjective, I like blank and blank but don’t like blank and blank.” Or you could even respond with, “My name is blank, I have blank hair, blank height, blank clothes, and blank color eyes.”

What would you respond with?

These words, said by Alice in chapter four, not only exemplify bad grammar, but also her inner fight between curiosity and regret. She goes on to say “I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole — and yet — and yet — it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!” (page 39 of Annotated Alice). This line shows how even when a person doesn’t want to experience something, their curiosity pushes them into a situation they don’t want to enter (in this case another world).

Why do you think that is?

We all know that curiosity is a big instigator of peoples actions, but how could it possibly overpower a person’s reluctance to do something? How can you not want to do something but your curiosity pushes you do it anyways? Is our human will really that weak? Can we be easily manipulated through our curiosity?

It’s like the little magic bottle saying “Drink Me” is a commercial ad to Wonderland and Alice is being sucked in like we get sucked in to the Billy Mays’ commercials.

Chapter three is built on a play on words. I don’t think there would be a chapter three if Carroll hadn’t decided to write a whole chapter with pun after pun. Let’s start at the beginning, the name of the chapter, “A Caucus – Race and  Long Tale.” The title itself mentions two instances in the chapter where Carroll plays with words.

The first of which was the Caucus race, symbolizing the competition between opposing political parties. The term ‘caucus’ describes the meeting of leaders to decide on a policy, and the event of a race (where the participants are running in circles) describes the idea that committee members practically ‘run around in circles’ while getting nothing done. In the text (page 31, Annotated Alice) Carroll writes “There was no ‘One, two, three and away!’ but they began running when they liked and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over.” This very much describes the reality of politics. The way in which politicians continue in their ‘race’ even when it is not a legitimate, official competition.

Later in the chapter, Carroll plays around with homophones such as ‘tale’ and ‘tail’ or ‘knot’ and ‘not’. This word play really doesn’t serve to act as the ‘Trojan Horse’ for one of Carroll’s political ideals, but instead serves to sort of play around with (and kind of make fun of) the English language. By playing around with homophones, the flaws of the English language are brought to the attention of the readers, as well as an instance of common confusion that occurs in everyday life. Alice’s misinterpretation of the Mouse’s words in this chapter are a prime example of what often happens with young children. Unlike adults, they are not able to use deductive reasoning to figure out that the Mouse was saying ‘tale’ not ‘tail’ and ‘not’ not ‘knot’ (that was rather confusing).

To me, it seems that the play on words, such as these, are what makes Wonderland a ‘nonsense’ world. Unlike the ‘real’ world, there is no reasonable thinking going on that comprehends strange metaphors, literary devices, and grammar usage.

In fact, I would almost  say that all of Wonderland is practically mocking the English language. That might be going a bit too far, Carroll may just have been trying to get the girls to laugh because he knew they were old enough to catch the play on words. That, I am not sure of.

The things that go through Alice’s mind during the transformation shenanigans in chapter two seem abnormal to me for a young girl in that situation. You would think that in times of oddities she would not question who she is, as she does on pages 22 and 23 of Annotated Alice, but would question the strange world she had landed in.

Furthermore, why does Alice begin imagining feeling a little different when really she is the same Alice just in a different world?

This is the third time so far that Alice has not showed the normal thought patterns that one expects her to show. In chapter one she thought nothing of a talking rabbit, and then she was falling down the rabbit hole, not questioning why it was taking so long to fall but instead thinking about her cat and what would happen if she fell straight through the earth.

Could it be that Carrol is trying to tell us something through Alice’s abnormal thoughts? (Not her actual thoughts, but they way and instances in which they are formed.)

Are her strange thought patterns in these instances a result of the oddities that have occurred or are they the cause? Does this show how our thought processess and views on situations effect our actions?

In the introduction, Gilvert K. Chesterton says that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was not meant to be analyzed, that the story was not meant to be in the hands of scholars and analysts. According to him the story is meant for innocent children and the thoughts behind the text should not be considered.

This makes sense if you consider that Dodgson created this story on the spot and could not possibly have had time to say anything worth analyzing. But then you must take into consideration that when writing the story he added ideas and the story grew from there. In that case there is something worth analyzing. The story may have begun as something not meant to be analyzed, something only children should read.  But as the story expanded and the meaning of the words grew deeper, it would seem that the story transformed from a story for the innocent into a story for the educated.

There’s also a line in the introduction that says, “No joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes a point has to be explained.”

Children may comprehend the surface of the story, the very obvious jokes that are presented, but there are jokes and ideas behind the text that are meant for adults. Only adults can be expected to be able to explain these ideas. Therefore, it is expected for the story to be analyzed. It would seem that the story has almost dual purposes. One is to entertain the innocent minds of children and the other is some deeper meaning that I have yet to explore. In the end, it seems as if Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can either be a story of a place where the mind can escape or a story of a place that symbolizes the things in life that should be analyzed but aren’t.