Week 12 Extra Credit Reading Notes: Looking Glass Unit

Lewis Carroll has such an interesting way of writing that is quite nonsensical but still allows you to follow the story and not focus on the details and how much they are not making sense
-Alice is a lot younger in this story than when I think of her in Alice in Wonderland. She tells Humpty Dumpty that she is only seven and six months, and she seems quite aware for her age
-The people in the looking glass house are not very nice to her, but she does not seem particularly upset by that, rather I think she understands that this is a part of the world that she is in
-There is a lot of poetry in this reading and normally I do not like poetry but I actually enjoyed it quite a lot in this reading, it was quite light and read very easily
-I like the shift from Alice being in a house that somewhat resembles her normal world, and she is somewhat in control there and illustrates it by picking up the chess pieces and moving them around, but as time goes on it shifts and she becomes the one who does not know what is going on and the world becomes crazier and more nonsensical
-I do not understand how Alice went from not being able to be seen by the chess pieces to being seen by Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, but perhaps that was in the chapters that were skipped in the reading
-Lewis Carroll obviously put a lot of work into writing the Jaborwocky poem because the words, although nonsense, do actually intuitively make some sense when Humpty Dumpty explains them. It is obvious that he did not pick random words and make them mean something, he picked words that matched his meaning and I think that is even more creative and makes the poem make sense before it is even explained

Story source: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871).

(illustration by John Tenniel)