The Great Fall Of Authority In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

The Great Fall of Authority

As Alice journeys through Wonderland and Looking-glass Land, she encounters a variety of characters whose nonsensical assertions call into question her tacit ontological assumptions. The strange logic these characters introduce to Alice forces her to acknowledge and reevaluate learned perceptions that she had previously accepted as objective truths. Because many of Carroll’s absurdities bear an exaggerated but recognizable resemblance to observable phenomena in society, the paradoxically meaningful nonsense causes Alice (and the reader) to experience epiphanies about the nature of the phenomena Carroll satirizes. In this way, Carroll cleverly, and ironically, uses nonsense to raise consciousness. Specifically, Carroll employs nonsense in the Alice books to construct a satirical, dystopian view of authority. One example can be

This nonsense serves to educate us through presentations of new, and possibly enlightening, ways of thinking about society. Contrarily, it also serves to exploit the truly nonsensical nature of dominant societal structures and thought processes. Carroll uses ridiculous characters, such as Humpty Dumpty, to satirize illogical phenomena in the “real” world that often pass as natural and unworthy of scrutiny. Because Humpty Dumpty is simultaneously constructed as a narcissist, a pedant, a charlatan, and an authority figure, Carroll succeeds in invalidating the notion of authority as necessarily beneficial. By the end of the chapter, both Alice and the reader acknowledge her exchange with Humpty Dumpty as tiresome and counterproductive. And as Alice declares with disgust, “’Of all the unsatisfactory people I ever met—‘” she hears the sound of Humpty Dumpty’s ill-fated fall from his pedestal, “a heavy crash [that] shook the forest from end to end”