like Alice’s destiny to being a queen is already fated from the beginning of the story. The game of chess also suggests a preordained way of life where all individuals are guided by an unseen force. The movement of the individuals in the game are equivalent to the movement of the respective chess pieces.
Alice’s goal in the book is the attainment of queenhood and Alice like a strategic chess player relies on rules and logic but is always confronted by the realities which do not agree to her idea of reason. It is an irony that the game that is controlled by logic, calculations, strategy serves as a backdrop in a world where living backward and inversions are considered normal. The game of Chess gives a structure for Alice in the Looking Glass world. She joins the game of Chess from Chapter 2 and though new to the Looking- Glass world she asserts that she wants to be queen and not just a pawn, hinting at some kind of growth in her character. Īlice meets all the main characters in these two chapters as Chess pieces and also in their human form. The contrast in the reader’s own reality makes the readers question their already established knowledge of the world and of what is accepted as normal.Īlice in these first two chapters is astounded by the beauty of the garden, she wanders around speaking to the flowers not knowing that the flowers can talk and is taken aback when the flowers respond to her questions and think her to be one of the them who can move. Carroll challenges the perception of reality through the use of inversion in the looking glass world. The theme of inversion starting from the first two chapters runs extensively throughout the novel. It is written in the form of a ballad and the rhythm appeals to the ears. The theme of the poem is victory of good over evil.
The poem may seem nonsensical at first but a close reading reveals it to be a tale of a hero returning victorious after having slain the villain, the Jabberwock. The poem contains a lot of portmanteau words such as ‘slithy’ and ‘mimsy’ and ‘chortle,’ Some have even found their way into the English language. It is in one of these games of pretend that Alice falls into the Looking-Glass world where she finds a Looking- Glass book with a poem titled “JABBERWOCKY” which can be read only when held in front of a mirror.
This vivid imagination of Alice helps her get away from a lonesome reality. To escape from the lonesome reality, Alice slips into the world of ‘pretend’ where she pretends to be the adult and would mother her kittens and discipline them like an adult disciplines her.
The lonely seven and a half year old protagonist Alice is often left by herself with no companion so she keeps herself entertained by ‘playing pretend’. Carroll who is known for his passion for Contrast introduces us to the use of Inversion from the first two chapters of the text.
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