Through the Looking-Glass. That book honestly feels like Lewis Carroll said, “Okay, so you survived Wonderland, huh? Let’s crank the weirdness up and see how far you’ll follow Alice.” And I loved it. It’s like a mirror-dream of the first adventure, where everything you thought you understood is suddenly upside down and reversed—literally, because Alice climbs through her drawing room mirror and steps into a world where the rules are flipped inside out.
It did give me that giddy shiver when Alice crawls through the glass and discovers that the chess pieces in her house can live in this reflected world. And, such as, suppose your toys start to blink and move. The Red Queen in particular--my God, she comes right into the life of Alice, and tells her that she will be a queen, provided she plays the chessboard game correctly, and that she will work her way out of the pawn ranks to the queen. And the manner in which Alice receives it, as a child who does not think but simply says, well, I guess, let’s play, gave me that feeling of nostalgia, of being a little one and thinking that anything can happen.
There is a level of madness to this book. Wonderland was an arbitrary disorder, but Through the Looking-Glass is more patterned, like a riddle enclosed in rules. The nonsense words in the poem Jabberwocky, by themselves, nonsense words that somehow seem to have meaning, I tell you that Carroll was pushing his imaginings to the limit. I remember when I first read it as a child, I was speaking like a mumbling machine, saying ’Twas brillig, çenumerate. And in a way, it did. The words are not meaningful in their usual sense, but they seem to be, and that gets at you.
Then there’s Humpty Dumpty, sitting cuckoo on his wall, giving Alice her world back to her by explaining to her superior, I can make everything sound like what I want to sound like manner. I even laughed, but then I remembered the fact that it is actually frightening, right? Because it’s not just whimsy. Carroll is jabbing at the flimsy nature of the meaning itself. I had that sinking feeling: words are surely well grounded because we all find them the same. Violate that contract, and the floor slips out under your feet all at the same time.
And Tweedledee and Tweedledum… oh, they’re unsettling in a different way. They’re like a creepy reflection of childishness, with their singsong rhymes and their story of the Walrus and the Carpenter—two tricksters luring innocent oysters to their doom. That scene actually stayed with me because it’s so sweet and cruel at the same time, like Carroll is whispering, “Don’t trust every charming story; there’s always a bite hidden somewhere.”
And the White Knight--oh, that kind of hurt me a bit. He is stumbling, clumsy, falling off his horse all the time, but there is something bitter and tender about the way he brings Alice along, creating strange contraptions that won’t run, trying to be a useful person. I felt this ache for him. Similar to him, he symbolizes that point when you find out adults are not perfect, they are just stumbling over their own broken creations, trying to come to the rescue. He seemed to me the most human being in the book, and I must say I would have liked to embrace him.
And then the last one, when Alice becomes a queen at last--it’s crazy. She is carried into this party where the Red and White Queens quarrel like hysterical aunts and the feast degenerates into lunacy. And Alice, who has been doubting it all, loses her patience, she picks up the Red Queen and shakes her--and just like that, she wakes up with her kitten. I was struck by that indistinction between dream and reality. Was it merely a dream or is his dream real as the world he lives in? Carroll does not answer, and perhaps this is the point.
I experienced this weird combination of pleasure and discomfort when I shut the book. Wonderland was delightful nonsense, and Through the Looking-Glass was not. It also challenged reason, language and even the concept of reality itself. It brought me back to that feeling of how vulnerable childhood is once you begin to see how unfair the world is sometimes and how unclear its rules can be. It is as though Carroll showcased to us not only a dream world, but the instability of our real world upon waking.
Reading it was like falling through a mirror and returning a little different - still feeling dizzy, yet still spellbound, but somehow haunted too.
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