Nonsense and Justice in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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You would think that Lewis Carroll an English author, mathematician and logician would sit down and write a logical, didactical novel, instead he wrote a novel of the literary nonsense genre. Unusual, is it not? Maybe we should take a closer look at Carroll's “nonsense“ and see why is it considered to be random, senseless, unpredictable, and without rules. Moreover, even justice is not spared of parody, injustice and chaos are logical consequences of living in Wonderland.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a story about a little girl who comes into contact with unpredictable, illogical, basically mad world of Wonderland by following the White Rabbit into a huge rabbit – hole. Everything she experiences there challenges her perception and questions common sense. This extraordinary world is inhabited with peculiar, mystical and anthropomorphic creatures that constantly assault Alice which makes her to question her fundamental beliefs and suffer an identity crisis. Nevertheless, as she woke up from “such a curious dream” she could not help but think “as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been ”.

As I mentioned earlier, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, beside being an English author was a mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer . Carrol created the character of Alice to entertain a daughter of his good friend Dean of Christ Church, little girl named Alice Liddell. The story was first published in 1865.

One of the key characteristics of Carroll's story is his use of language. Consequently, much of the nonsense in Alice has to do with transpositions, either of mathematical scale or in the scrambled verse parodies. As an illustration of mathematical scale transposit...

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...“Of with his head! ” is never enforced, it is an act of self – preservation. To us adults Lewis’s constant breaking of the law of logic is not natural, we fight against it, but if we look just a little deaper into our iner child, we can comprehende why children love improbable. I think all of us would like to enter at least just for a moment into this marvellous and wondrous world of Wonderland where everything is possible and nothing is reasonable and consistent. Would it not be nice to be in the world where everone is mad, but therefore none is?

For my conclusion I picked my favourite quote from the book because it is a nice example of nonsense that spreads out through the book. This humurous nonsense is one of many reasons which make this book vastly popular with adults as well as children. All things considered Wonderland is a world all of us want to sneak in.

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