Ideas And Conflection In Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking-Glass

The entirety of the plot of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass is built around the idea of a mirror and what its reflection means. The story starts out with the protagonist, Alice’s, interest in a mirror in her home as she wonders how the world is different on the other side. Through a little bit of dream magic, Alice can crawl through the mirror and see for herself what it’s like on the other side; as one might imagine, antics ensue. Henceforth in Carroll’s story, it is important to remember that a mirror does not plainly reflect exactly what is presented in front of it, but with its inherent imperfections warps some parts of reality into something not entirely reliable. Thus, in looking-glass land not only is everything reversed, but

She is a disheveled and blunderous person, and Alice has a hard time understanding her sense of logic. For example, she explains to Alice that her memory works both backwards and forwards, and that the things she remembers best are “things that happened the week after next” (149). Considering the course of the story thus far, the Queen’s rationale is in line with the idea of inversion, as it is the opposite of the way things are thought of outside of the looking-glass. That is to say it is not distortion, but calculated polarity. However, a few pages into her conversation with the Queen, the scene somehow shifts, and the Queen is now a sheep, while the forest she was in is now a shop. She talks with the sheep for a bit before the it asks her if she can row. She looks down and to her astonishment she is in a boat in a river. Minutes later, once again, she is back in the shop and the boat and water have vanished. This is one of the multiple instances in the story where Looking-Glass Land’s reflection warps the continuity of space and is proven unreliable. Outside of the Looking-Glass, Alice has expectations for how things should be, however inside, theses rules are irregular at best. In the “real world” we can expect to stay in

With Alice’s journey through Looking-Glass Land and across the chess board, a reader with knowledge of Lewis Carroll’s personal life and inspirations can clearly see the connection between the two. The real-life Alice Liddell, the girl who Carroll had taken a liking to and based his character Alice on, was now over 16 years old, compared to the young girl that she had been when he had first met her and later written the first book (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). Regardless of how one reads into their relationship, it is easy to then see that the contents of Carroll’s story are directly symbolic and reflective of Alice Liddell’s maturing, hence fictional Alice’s crossing of the chessboard to become a queen. The story reflects what is hard for Lewis Carroll to watch, a girl he has known and cared for since she was a child, turning into a