Alice In Wonderland Analysis

In the Philosophy of Nonsense: The Institutions of Victorian Nonsense Literature, Jean-Jacques Lecercle explicates literary nonsense: “[it] both supports the myth of an informative and communicative language and deeply subverts it by first whetting then frustrating the readers deep-seated need for meaning.” Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, fabricates a humorous, yet visceral reflection of the world we live in by juxtaposing Alice’s need to implement the rules of the world above and Wonderland’s creatures’ explicit refusal of doing so. The conversations between the Mad Hatter and Alice at the tea party about Time as an abstract concept versus a lawless man, who demands appeasement, showcase the inconsistency of Wonderland by parodying
Murdering time implies the mortality of Time, as the Mad Hatter suggests at the tea party, but in reference to our world it may mean that the Mad Hatter wasted time or butchered a rhythm in his performance, a reference to Alice’s interpretation of time where time implies keeping rhythm. As a result of such an embarrassing performance, the Queen of Hearts accused the Hatter for murdering time, in the metaphorical sense, but the character of Time is aggrieved and gets his revenge by situating the Hatter in perpetual teatime. The Mad Hatter’s watch shows a date, but neither hours nor minutes, indicating that the tea party must go on for at least a year unless Time and the Mad Hatter make amends. The rules of a regular clock are assumingly inapplicable in this situation, but the function of the object remains the same: to indicate time. Simultaneously, both definitions, the one of time serving its original abstract purpose in the form of a watch and time being an unappeased individual, are employed in Wonderland. How can Time exist as a person and as the intended form of a clock in the same realm? Personification only partially explains the absurdity of Time in Alice in
It is absurd that time can mean so many different things in different contexts all at the same time, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Time can become a person, who exerts strict rule over those that displease him or a way of keeping rhythm through the use of a metronome. As Alice traverses through the story, she always attempts to make sense of the various situations, then begins giving her own sense to the situations like aforementioned, until the end when she realizes the futility of trying to find meaning in a world that resists any and every form of definitive interpretation because it doesn’t really exist, as seen in Alice’s Evidence when Alice realizes Wonderland is a dream which she can wake up from. She grows, both in the literal and intellectual sense, by realizing Wonderland is an illusion she can