Alice’s Dreams and Thoughts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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Recommended: Critical analysis of alice's adventures in wonderland

Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland follows a young girl named Alice on her adventures through her dream world of Wonderland. It is a scary world for “poor Alice”, as the narrator often calls her, as she battles changing size, being terrorized by over sized animals, and being yelled at by an evil queen. While battling all of these things she is also battling her own mental stability. In the novel, Lewis Carroll elaborates on Alice’s dreams and thoughts, and there are wide varieties of interpretations by readers.
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, dreaming could debatably be one of the most important factors. This is because the story takes place in Alice’s dreamland of Wonderland.
In the novel, “The loose, episodic dream structure and playful use of symbolic nonsense enable varied and even contradictory readings” (Sigler). The dream like state of the Alice books brings various meanings to readers. Part of the appeal may be that the books can cause the books to mean what the reader wants or needs because of the dream like state. Alice’s appeal could be her identity, which even then inhabitants of Wonderland struggle to understand (Sigler).
----However, it is not simply a dream for “poor Alice”, but more of a night terror. For example, in the novel Alice says,” ‘It was much pleasanter at home,’ thought poor Alice, ‘when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. 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’” (Carroll, 43)! It is in fact her own imagination sending her though these obstacles, which could very well be terrifying for a young girl. Though some believe that it terrifies Alice becau...

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...Twayne's Masterwork Studies 81. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Jan. 2014.
Sigler, Carolyn. "Introduction." Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books: An Anthology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. xi-xxiii. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Marie C. Toft and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 139. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Jan. 2014.
Susina, Jan. "Educating Alice: The Lessons of Wonderland." Jabberwocky--The Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society 18.1-2 (Winter-Spring 1989): 3-9. Rpt. in Children's Literature Review. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 108. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Jan. 2014.
Walker, Stan. "An overview of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Jan. 2014.

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