Literary Analysis Of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

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Within Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll utilizes an unique nonsense writing techniques including, poems, motifs, and homonyms puns, doing this Carroll creates humorous situations between Alice and the creatures she encounters. Nonsense literature presents situations and dialect which are not typical for example within, the text Carroll’s characters ask many riddles that are left unanswered, leaving the readers to question even once completed, the most famous, “why is a raven like a writing-desk” (Carroll 60)? Carroll defies the rules of language, logic, and representation with his brilliant expedition in an unusual reality, where common sense references are challenged and figurative meanings are repeatedly taken literally. …show more content…

Have you guessed the riddle yet?" Alice answers, "No, I give it up… "What 's the answer?" The Hatter responds with, “I haven 't the slightest idea." (Carroll 60-61)This ‘riddle shows an example of the type of nonsense Carroll uses, which acts to bargain with one hand what it denies the other; the riddle frustrates Alice. Secondly, Carroll’s nonsensical devices, which defy the rules of language, include, puns, or words with two meanings. “We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” (Carroll 84) or “That 's the reason they 're called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.” (Carroll 87) These quotes exemplify two words, which are collapsed into one meaning. The examples offered by …show more content…

Frye states that “such repetitive formulas break down and confuse the conscious,”(178) throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the problems that Alice face constantly
revolve around logic, wordplay, and subtle tricks of perception, the first being seen when Alice first sees the white rabbit, nothing clicks in Alice’s mind when the rabbit first speaks, “but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it”(Carroll 2), this is the point when Alice realizes that rationally something is wrong. A more complex example of Carroll’s practice of absurd reason is seen when the Duchess advises Alice, that the
moral of that is 'Be what you would seem to be ' or, if you 'd like
it put more simply 'Never imagine yourself to be otherwise than
what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been
was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them
 to be otherwise ' (Carroll 81). In terms of logic Carroll plays with the binary between what is true and false which is the foundation of the sensible logistical nature of binary logic, Carroll 
is able to create humor through this

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