Through the Looking Glass

The title of the story is Through the Looking-Glass, written by Lewis Carroll. The book is about a young girl named Alice. While playing with a kitten and staring at a mirror, Alice wonders about what the world would be like on the other side of the mirror. To her surprise, she is able to go through the mirror to explore another dimension. She finds a book with looking-glass poetry, “Jabberwocky,” that she can only read by holding it up to a mirror. While leaving the house, she enters into a garden, where the flowers speak to her mistaking her for a flower. Alice then meets the Red Queen, who proposes a throne to Alice if she moves to the eighth rank in a chess game. Alice is placed as the White Queen's pawn, and she starts the game by taking a train to the fourth rank since pawns in chess can move two spaces on the first move. She then meets Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who she is familiar with from the famous nursery rhyme. After reciting the long poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter” to Alice, the two continue to act out the events of their own poem. Alice carries on to meet the White Queen, who later transforms into a sheep. Here the White Queen helps her cross into the sixth square. The sixth square brings complete madness, introducing Humpty Dumpty, and witnessing the furious battle between the Unicorn and the Lion fighting for the crown. Square Seven delivers the White Knight, who helps guide Alice to the last square. When she reaches the eighth and final square, Alice finally becomes a queen alongside the Red and White Royalty, and a party is held in celebration. As they toast to the new queen, Alice wakes up in her old world to find that she has been dreaming the adventure. Or has she?

The protagonist of the story is a seven-year-old girl with good intentions named Alice. Her dream leads her to exciting adventures in Looking-Glass World. Alice has determined her own thoughts of the peculiar world and becomes aggravated when Looking-Glass World challenges those insights. The main antagonist is the Red Queen, a fussy dominating woman who makes Alice participate in the chess game. Though she is civilized, she harasses Alice about her lack of common sense and good manners. Other characters include the Red and White Kings, the White Queen, the twins, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Knight. The Red King is a king who might be dreaming this whole story, while the White King is a quite the one to be very paranoid and senile. The White Queen appears to be very absent-minded, yet she is the opposite of the Red Queen. With the twins, whether they are fighting or entertaining each other, these two never stop. Humpty Dumpty is an egg-like creature who thinks himself a very wise one, and who has connections with the White King. The White Knight is a kind and gentle, yet clumsy, old fellow who rescues Alice from the Red Knight and helps her on her journey.

Through the Looking-Glass is set in Victorian England in the upper class home of Dean Liddell in Oxford. The significance of this particular setting is that the looking-glass world is composed of familiar English scenes, such as riding on a train, walking in a flower garden, browsing in a shop, etc. If the setting of the story was changed, the outcome of it would not be the same. It would give a different feeling to it, and the scenes of the story would not necessarily symbolize anything.

Conflict happens whenever Alice meets a new character and is being confronted with its peculiar rules and behavior. The main conflict occurs during Alice's dinner-party, when strange things start to happen and the guests convert into other beings. Resolution comes when a frustrated Alice seizes the table-cloth and crashes everything onto the floor. She then picks up the Red Queen and starts shaking her. This shaking makes Alice wake up and realize that it is only one of the kittens that she is holding.

Although the first book has the deck of cards as a theme, this second book is slightly based on a game of chess, played on a giant chessboard with fields for squares. Most main characters met in the story symbolize a chess piece, along with Alice herself being a pawn. However, the chess game described cannot be carried out legally due to a move where white doesn't move out of check. The looking-glass world is divided into sections by brooks, with the crossing of each brook indicates a notable change in the action and scene of the story.  The brooks represent the divisions between squares on the chessboard, and Alice crossing them represents the advancing of her piece one square. The sequence of moves is not always followed which goes along with the book's mirror image reversal theme.

This story is filled with symbolism. The characters represent chess pieces, the scenes symbolize the squares on the chessboard, and the setting represents England. A big form of sybolism is when Alice pulls rushes from the water in Chapter Five; they represent dreams. The rapid fading of the rushes’ sweet scent after being picked corresponds to the memory of a dream after a person wakes up. Another major form of symbolism is when Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell Alice that she is only a creation of the Red King’s dream, which implies that Looking-Glass World is not in Alice’s dream. The Red King becomes an almighty figure who dreams up all of Alice’s adventures, believing the idea that she does not really have any identity beyond what she is allowed in the context of the dream.

I would greatly recommend that others read this book. Not only is there impressive imagery, but the acknowledgement of a possible second world out there rivals the belief shared by many today that life can exist on other planets. Carroll uses games symbolically which will appeal to a wide audience. Characters, both realistic (as Alice) and imaginary, hold the attention of the reader making this classic tale one that both children and adults can enjoy.