Through The Looking Glass

Alice, the story’s protagonist, embodies the theme of Reflections on Imagination, Growth, and Maturity. The story follows her Navigating a World With Nonsensical Rules. Though she is creative and imaginative, she is also logical, which makes it challenging for her to accept the nonsensical people and events she encounters in looking-glass land. She looks for logical explanations for the things she encounters, such as talking flowers and the White Queen’s backward memory, though she does not often get them. Instead, she must learn to accept the looking-glass world as she finds it, with its strange characters, customs, and settings. Many of these characters and settings mirror things from Alice’s real world, like the game of chess or the nursery rhyme characters Humpty Dumpty and the Lion and the Unicorn. Alice’s incomplete understanding of the rules of chess and the political-historical significance of the nursery rhyme “The Lion and the Unicorn” reflect her young age. The way that that incomplete understanding transforms into nonsensical situations in the looking-glass world suggests that following the nonsense rules of the looking-glass world mirrors the experience of trying to follow the adult world’s rules as a child.