Alice in Wonderland text analysis

• Author's name Charles Dodgson (alas Lewis Carroll, 1832 - 1898), he himself was projected in a book as "Dodo", since the author had this nickname due to stutter.

• Place - Oxford, England
• Date - 4-July-1865, after 3 years of that renown river walk with three Liddell girls
• In 1890 he made a version "for kids" meaning he knew the "potential" of the book in its original form
• The story was written for his favourite girl Alice, his friend's daughter
• She wanted the story to be chaotic

• Plot imaginary travels
• Setting dreams of a little girl
• Atmosphere chaos, nonsense
• Characterization
• Theme Friendship, wickedness which helps to win in life
• Point of view

1. 3rd person narration, the author narrates for Alice and even expresses her thoughts and should-have-been-her-thoughts, often breaking the fourth wall and talking to us, readers
2. Linear narrative (in a chronological order)
3. Viewpoint narrative (expresses main chara's opinion like thoughts and etc)
4. The author mocks at Alice but still supportive of her

• Figurative language and literary devices they're used in each and every sentence to highlight the imaginative and dreamlike narration

• Highlightening "very" plus using it together with negative pronouns like "nor", "nothing" - to make contrast in NON-ordinary things
• In another moment DOWN went Alice after it - verb prior to subject, to highlight the speed of the events happening
• Repeatition: Down, down, down - repeating word to denote the long time passage
• Breaking the 4th wall: Fancy curtseying as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?
• Breaking the 4th wall: For Alice, you see, was ...
• Alliteration: doors all round the hall, but all locked; Alice all way down, walked sadly down the middle
• So many out-of-the-way things happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible
• Hyperbole: shedding gallons of tears
• Hyperbole: shrinking away altogether
• Low, timid voice .... The Rabbit started violently
• Queer... Today - yesterday... Just as usual
• Growing small
• Positively refused
• Dodo was compared to Shakespeare
• Poor Grammar: she had put on one of the rabbit's little white kid-gloves while she said talking."how can I have done that!"
• it was much pleasenter at home!
• I do wonder what can have happened to me!
• Poor Grammar of other characters that shows odd similarity to Alice: Where can I have dropped them, I wonder! @The Rabbit
• Curiouser and curiouser!
• In another moment, splash!
• When suddenly, thump! Thump! down she came
• The mouse was addressed as "it" by Alice and as "he" by himself
• Carroll's Dodo was intended as a caricature of himself—his stammer is said to have made him pronounce his name "Dodo-Dodgson." The Duck is the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, who often accompanied Carroll on boating expeditions with the Liddell sisters. The Lory, an Australian parrot, is Lorina, who was the eldest of the sisters (this explains why, in the second paragraph of the next chapter, she says to Alice, "I'm older than you, and must know better"). Edith Liddell is the Eaglet.
• Dodo and Caucas race ("Caucasian race due to which dodo became extinct")
• Pun:

“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing.

"It IS a long tail, certainly,' said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse's tail; "but why do you call it sad?"

• Neat little house (of the Rabbit), tidy little room, tiny white kid-gloves

• Go messages on instead of go on errand
• Stop in the house instead of stay in the house
• Contrast: she very goodnaturedly began hunting about them
• Oxymorron: enormous puppy
• Hyperbole: immense length, sea of green leaves
• a grin without a cat

• Relativity theory: every thing depends on the spectator's point of view: if the fall is too slow or the hole is too long
• Aspects of the expanding-universe theory. Her narrow escape in this passage calls to mind a diminishing-universe theory once advanced in Carrollian jest by the eminent mathematician Sir Edmund Whittaker. Perhaps the total amount of matter in the universe is continually growing smaller, and eventually the entire universe will fade away into nothing at all.
• In Carroll's day there was considerable popular speculation about what would happen if one fell through a hole that went straight through the center of the earth. Plutarch had asked the question and many famous thinkers, including Francis Bacon and Voltaire, had argued about it. Galileo (Dialogo dei Massimi Sistemi, Giornata Seconda, Florence edition of 1842, Vol. 1, pages 251-52), gave the correct answer: the object would fall with increasing speed but decreasing acceleration until it reached the center of the earth, at which spot its acceleration would be zero.
• The simplest explanation of why Alice will never get to 20 is this: the multiplication table traditionally stops with the twelves, so if you continue this nonsense progression—4 times 5 is 12, 4 times 6 is 13, 4 times 7 is 14, and so on—you end with 4 times 12 (the highest she can go) is 19—just one short of 20.

Searching for her self:

• ” Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
• "It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."
• "What will become of me?"

Bragging like a brat, belittling her classmates:

• I'm sure I can't be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows sick a very little!

Always pities herself:

• Poor Alice!
• Said poor Alice

Spoiled:

• I shall have to go and liver in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with

little experience:

• She had somehow fallen into the sea, "and in that case I can go back by the railway" (general conclusion)