Critical Analysis Of Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass

Critical Analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass

Name: Mahima Passi

Course: B.A (Hons.) English

Enrollment no: A7706113004

ABSTRACT

Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There(1871)by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) is a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). They are written during the Victorian era and are categorized under the genre of Children’s Literature. His works have illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. The language, plot and setting used by Carroll do not make sense to the reader at its first reading for which it is often described as a masterpiece of “nonsense” literature.The looking glass world is divided into sections by brooks, with the crossing of each brook there is a change in the

It is then he used to tell stories of dream land to Alice and her sister’s. It is then that Alice exclaimed that he must write down the story for her, which he later accepted. With the permission of Alice he published his two novels with Alice herself as the protagonist. The novel that seems to be filled with fantasy has a hidden meaning in it. Lewis Carroll never wanted his friends to grow up because he would lose the bond with them once they grow up. The novel Through the Looking Glass is a novel in which the whole of the story is put to us as a dream. When the novel opens she sees a chess board on a table, and it is an element of fantasy how she tries to gets through the mirror and is able to get across it. The chess that she noticed before getting through the mirror is what is reflected in the mirror and her character changed with the change of each block in chess. She began as a pawn follows the rules and reaches the last block and becomes the queen. In the looking glass world she comes across “Jabberwocky” poem which she could only read by its mirror

Alice’s or Red king? It claims doubts whether the dream was about one’s unconscious or subconscious life. Alice is not sure about all that happens to her in Looking Glass land, she does not even know whether it was her own fantasy or whether she was literally and metaphorically a pawn in someone else’s control. Looking Glass is worked out with mathematical precision as a chess game, in which Alice moves along towards a visible goal. The novel ends with the suggestion thatwe are all part of the dream of a godlike Red King whose own unconscious wishes predetermined our lives. The novel is set in the scenario of the reality of growing older- of fading, paling, yellowing and withering. Alice is rudely told by the flowers that she is beginning to fade. Humpty Dumpty questions her closely about her age and dwells on the possibility of death. The adult world is far from attractive, as the King and Queens appear to