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Essay on alice and wonderland

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Finding the Child in Us All Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has entertained not only children but adults for over one hundred years. The tale has become a treasure of philosophers, literary critics, psychoanalysts, and linguists. It also has attracted Carroll’s fellow mathematicians and logicians. There appears to be something in Alice for everyone, and there are almost as many explanations of the work as there are commentators. It may be perhaps Carroll’s fantastical style of writing that entertains the reader, rather than teaching them a lesson as was customary in his time. Heavy literary symbolism is difficult to trace through his works because of the fact he wrote mainly for entertainment. In fact, Carroll’s …show more content…

Alice’s narrow point of view will now begin to raise fundamental questions in her head about who she is. Alice “has reached the stage of development where the world appears explainable and unambiguous where, paradoxically, curiosity is wedded to the ignorant faith in the sanity of things” (qtd. In Otten 50). Alice’s curiosity will proceed to carry her on a complete rebirth in order to question the inevitable step from childhood to adulthood. It seems to her that she is quite the young adult. This is not such an unfamiliar thought as it is quite usual for a young child to want to behave as an adult. Her journey will sure enough challenge her belief of who she is. This journey begins when she “found herself falling down a very deep well” (Carroll 5). By falling down this hole, Alice is acting as a father. In hitting the bottom of the well she has moved on to the fetal stage. The first problem Alice encounters is finding a way to fit through the little door so small that she could not even fit her head through the doorway. She soon find a bottle labeled “drink me”. “The wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry” (At this point, Alice is still behaving the way a proper Victorian child would conduct themselves in the Victorian period.) She must find a way to exit the “womb” she is in so she can question the world she exists in. Thus, she compromises to drink what’s in the bottle causing her to shrink in size. This is the beginning of what the reader will

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