Everyone in Wonderland is Mad

 

I chose Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland cause it is really a special story for my personal life and it returned often in feelings. Carroll describes the fall into the rabbit-hole as very long and he mentions bookshelves (I’m a Librarian!) on the sides of the hole. Perhaps it is also an escape into literature he hints at and I deem in that way of travel too.

I loved Carroll both for his irony and his dark side. There’s a lot of humour in the first Alice’s book, but in the second the mood becomes darker and melancholic. The story about Alice falling through a hole and finding herself in a silly and nonsense world, is fairly guileless as a tale. Moreover the underlying story is about a girl maturing away from home in what seems to be a world ruled by chaos and nonsense, is quite a frightening one. Alice finds herself immersed in different situations involving curious animals being all alone and she cries quite often when it’s impossible to obey the rules of the Wonderland. She hasn’t got any help at all there. The theme with Alice growing and shrinking into different sizes could reflect the ups and downs of life with young people sometimes feeling adult and sometimes quite the opposite.

The quote “Everyone in Wonderland is mad, otherwise they wouldn’t be down here” told by the Cheshire Cat can be given an existential meaning. Is it that everyone alive is mad being alive, or everyone dreaming himself away is mad due to the escape from reality? Time is a very central theme in the story and a quote that expresses Carroll’s feelings for getting old is: “We are but older children, dear, / Who fret to find our bedtime near.”

Surely the subject on Carroll’s tales is really vast and there could probably be years spent on it without reaching a definitive lec