Lewis Carroll's Fiction

Lewis Carroll's fiction gives impossible situations a precise and often comic logic. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, changes of size and puzzling conversations repeatedly disturb Alice's sense of who she is and what the rules should be. Through the Looking-Glass develops a different pattern of reversals and transformations within a world associated with a chess game. Familiar sayings, lessons, and social manners become material for verbal play. The stories retain the alertness of a child's questioning voice, allowing humour to reveal how much ordinary authority depends on habits of language and assumptions that are rarely examined.