Themes of Through the Looking Glass

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Reflection/Reversal The most apparent example of this theme is the looking-glass itself, which provides a reflection of the actual world for Alice to explore. Within the looking-glass, everything is backwards. Text is reversed: Alice reads the poem Jabberwocky backwards. Space/direction is inverted: Alice must walk away from where she wants to go in the garden in order to actually get there. Ideas are also inverted, which is plain in many of the conversations that Alice has with the characters encountered in the looking-glass world. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are mirror images of each other. The White Knight talks about putting a right foot into a left shoe. In the railway carriage, Alice is traveling in the wrong direction. Satire Carroll does not mean this tale to be serious. For one thing, an imaginative child who talks to cats is the protagonist, and it is she who leads the reader through the book. Additionally, there is no sense of consistency in the book; as soon as a rule for the looking-glass world is introduced, it is either abandoned or changed. Further, Carroll appears to be poking fun at adult intellectualism. All the characters who attempt logical debate either argue themselves into confusion or lose to a seven-year-old Alice. Dreaming Carroll sets his entire book in the context of a dream. Whose dream it is remains unclear, but Alice definitely acknowledges that she was having adventures in someone's dream, if not her own. What is so important about this is the fact that the absence of reality does not matter to the protagonist, and it clearly does not matter to the author. In fact, Carroll seems to believe that dreaming is the ideal, especially for young children, as suggested by the poem at the very end of the book. He goes as far as to suggest that there might not be any set reality at all, and that life is just the stuff of dreams. This
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