Alice blog post #1
By Omar Andre
Blog #1
Right now, I am about halfway through the book. Specifically 72/150 pages through. I’m gonna try to summarize what has happened, but this book moves quickly so I might accidentally skip one or two things.
The story begins with Alice, a little girl that’s bored. Alice hears a bunny say something like “I’m late, I’m late” And she, of course, follows the rabbit down a hole in a tree. She falls for a long time, but finally she lands on the ground. She falls in a hallway, she finds a golden key that unlocks a door to a garden. Reaching the garden then becomes Alice’s goal. She eats something and becomes small, eats something and becomes big, and then she cries. Eventually she sees the bunny again, and after failing to talk to it and frightening it, she acquires his fan and glove. The fan makes her small again, and because of her tears, everything is now flooding. She meets a rat, then more animals, then the rat guides them to a safe place. They have a race for some reason, and Alice gives them prices because of some reason. At the end Alice scares them off by talking about Dinah, her cat, which hunts animals. She meets the rabbit again, the rabbit confuses her with his housemaid, and sends her to his house for gloves. She goes to his house, eats something, becomes really big and gets defensive with the people that try to get her out of the house. She eventually shrinks and runs away. She finds a caterpillar that tells her to be patient. She then encounters a house and enters, here she finds the dutchess and her baby. Alice ends up taking care of the baby until it turns into a pig(???). She finds a smiling cat that can appear and disappear at will and it tells Alice that everyone is mad down there, and that’s where I’m at.
I really can’t discern any meaning from any of this. I would like to think that things will get clearer as the novel progresses and maybe even develops a coherent plot, but something tells me that isn’t going to happen. I think the main message is in the characters somehow, they each seem to represent something, they talk in specific and weird ways, and they always have strange goals. For example, there was an animal that got everyone to run around in a “race” to dry themselves, and then he decided everyone won this “race”, and then proceeded to demand Alice give everyone prizes. I’m at a loss as to what this could represent, but the book is short enough, so hopefully it’ll be a little clearer on a re-read.
Alice is a weird protagonist, she doesn’t behave at all how we would expect a protagonist to behave. Alice doesn’t have goals, and whatever the world throws at her, she just kind of accepts it as normal. This creates a kind of separation between us and Alice; I found myself kind of frustrated at having no clear plot and at Alice not trying to investigate anything. This separation gives us a place in the plot, I think. Right now I think that we’re the only sane ones in this place, and the story might later say something about what it thinks of sane people, of us. The other interpretation is that we could be mad too, because the cat said “you have to be mad to end up in this place”, and we’re in a way, in this place too.
Overall, the book has been pretty entertaining, and while I can’t find any discernable meaning yet, I’m excited to read the rest of the book and also not find any discernable meaning. Ås of right now, I give it a:
