Week 13 Extra Credit Reading: Through The Looking Glass Part 2

I read the second half of Through the Looking Glass for my extra credit reading this week because I enjoyed the first half so much last week. I found the second half to be more exciting than the first but also much more confusing and a little hard to follow. The first half, while whimsical and non-sensical, did seem to have a plot while the second half seemed to go on meandering and it was easy to get lost. While a resounding theme throughout the story was poetry, the story made it seem like Alice was going to slay the Jabberwocky or that it would seem somewhat important, and then we read it and never heard from it again. The whole use of pawns and knights was quite clever, and I liked how the knight kept falling off the horse- I read on wikipedia that this was supposed to imitate the L-shaped movements that knights make on a chess board. I would like to read the whole book, I think that would make the ending make a little more sense to me. I found it very interesting how Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum talked about Alice being in the Red King's dream, and if she woke him up then she would cease to exist. But they are in her dream. Very existential. The wordplay that existed between the two queens and Alice was so creative, but I found it strange that they were friends rather than being enemies like you would think they would be in a chess game. So once Alice grabbed the Red Queen and started shaking her, she put the Red King in checkmate and "won" the game and was allowed to wake up, according to Wikipedia. It was just amazing how all these details that seem to be so whimsical and random actually came together to tie into the major themes of the story

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

(illustration by John Tenniel)