Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: A Literary Analysis
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is a novel written in 1865 by the English writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
Apart from being a writer, Lewis Carroll was also a mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and a photographer. He is famous for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy. This is evident throughout his most famous novel.
The story is known worldwide by adults as well as children because adults, from Carroll’s day to the present, have been captivated by this story. Its narrative course and structure, characters, and imagery have been enormously influential in both popular culture and literature, especially in the fantasy genre.
This novel is one of the precursors of the Modernist novel because it presents many elements that were developed later on. It is also considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre.
As the editor Carolyn Sigler says in her anthology, “Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books”: “In the decades immediately following the publication of Carroll’s work, hundreds of literary parodies, sequels, spin-offs, and imitations began to appear. These Alice-inspired works reveal the kinds of cultural work the Alice books performed at specific times among different kinds of readers, as authors either paid tribute to, or reacted against…”
Regarding literary experimentation, Carroll pointed out that, since Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland story was complete, his purpose was to write something entirely new and original.
This tale is also known for all the innovations that Carroll introduced. For example, one of the key characteristics of Carroll’s story is his use of language. It constantly showcases wordplay. Sentences and phrases are twisted and turned around so that they mean several things at once and cause misunderstandings and humorous clashes between the characters.
Much of the “nonsense” in Alice has to do with transpositions. Also, much of the nonsense effect is achieved through conversations. And some of the nonsense in Wonderland is merely satirical. But the nature of nonsense is much like chance, and rules to decipher it into logical meaning or sense patterns work against the principal intent of Carroll’s purpose, which was that his nonsense was random, senseless, and unpredictable.
Just as non-traditional as its language style is the story’s narrative structure: The trajectory of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, with its rapid succession of episodic, apparently unrelated happenstances and encounters. The longer Alice stays in Wonderland, the more the readers are witnessing a total breakdown of (narrative) logic and a disintegration of the rules of unity of space and time, culminating in the last chapter’s complete collapse of the cardboard courtroom in which Alice’s trial is held.
The events of the story, thus, seem totally coincidental, always leaving open the possibility of yet another course of events, depending on the whims of the writer.