Alice Letter To The Author
By Omar Andre
Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland is a convoluted nonsensical story that uses various literary devices to highlight various aspects of this incoherent place.
Lewis Carrol constantly uses hyperbole to highlight both the world’s absurdity and Alice’s childish thoughts. One of the first examples we can read is after Alice falls into the hole, and has been falling for quite a bit. “I must be getting somewhere near the center of the Earth.” she says. Alice has been falling for quite a bit more than normal, this hyperbole brings attention to how weird that is. But apart from that, it also brings attention to Alice being a child. We know that the Earth is big, unfathomably big and we would have to have been falling for almost an hour, therefore, this hyperbole also brings into attention that Alice is a child.
I like how mood is used throughout the book. During that same sequence of Alice falling, there’s a strange mood of calmness and elegancy that Alice seems to have:
“I wonder what Latitude or Longitude
I ’ve got to ?” (Alice had not the slightest
idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but
she thought they were nice grand words to say.)”
Alice is falling down pretty fast and in a pretty strange situation, why is she concerned with sounding fancy? Alice is a child, and throughout the book, one of the only things she’s concerned with is following the politeness that she was raised with. Moods in this novel in general are pretty absolute, I think this is because Alice is a child. Another instance of mood is when Alice wanted to get in the garden but couldn’t find a way: “‘Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden with one eye; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again.’”
An example of Irony that is more towards the end is when the King says: “Don’t be nervous or I’ll have you executed on the spot!” It’s ironic that the King would say to not be nervous while at the same time threatening their life, something that they should be nervous about. This irony serves to characterize not just the king, but the whole royal family in general as an unfair group of people with power that sets unfair, pretty impossible expectations to people and then punishes them when they aren’t met. I think this might be a critique on adults and their sometimes unfair expectations for people to control their emotions in situations that don’t allow for that.
I liked the way that similes were used to characterize people. For example, here Carrol uses it to characterize the Queen as an irrationally angry person: “The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming”. Comparing the Queen to a wild beast paints her not just as angry, but also savage and irrational. I think this simile was very effective in characterizing the Queen. Another example of a simile is this:
““Oh how wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.’ For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things were impossible.”” Here a simile is used about Alice and a telescope to highlight the absurdity of the world already around her. She wishes she was like a telescope, and then believes it to be possible. This simile is effective in showing us Alice’s growing comfort and belief that anything is possible in this new wonderland.
I believe that a lot of characters are metaphors for things adults say. The easiest to see, I think, is the royal family. Members of the royal family are characterized by a single strong emotion. The Queen is unfathomably angry at everyone except Alice, the king is prideful, as demonstrated when the cat appears and he tries to have it executed, and the duchess tries to find a moral in everything, making all her morals nonsensical. I think the queen is a representation of false sweetness towards children in adults. When an adult is a bad person to everyone except to a child, the child still understands that the adult is in the wrong. The king represents the pride and arrogance that some adults have just because they are older, and the duchess is a metaphor representing the attempt to impart knowledge on kids just for the sake of it, rendering it nonsensical. While I wasn’t able to interpret and decipher the metaphors in all of the characters, especially the mad hatter, I still overall enjoyed the use of metaphors in Alice in Wonderland.