Which do you think it was? Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There “‘Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. This is a serious question, my dear [...] it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream of course - but then I was part of his dream, too! Was it the Red King, Kitty?’ [...] Which do you think it was?” “Life, what is it but a dream?” Lewis Carroll ends Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (TLGWAFT) in the same way he began the original Alice in Wonderland, with the motif of dreams and imagination. Despite this similarity, the tone with which this theme is expressed in these tales could not be more different. Alice in Wonderland is posed as a celebration of imagination and storytelling; Alice falling asleep allows her to escape “dull reality” and enjoy a “happy summer day.” Meanwhile, TLGWAFT is structured in the form of a game, in which one player must triumph over the other, and Alice escapes as she “ca’n’t stand [it] any longer.” This change in mood mirrors the change in the relationship between Carroll and Alice Liddell, the inspiration for his Alice tales. Between the creation of Alice In Wonderland, as discussed with Liddell and her sisters while on a boat trip up the Thames to Godstow in 1862, and the publicising of the second installment of the Alice tales in 1871, Carroll had noted that she seemed to have “changed a good deal, and hardly for the better.” Her childhood had ended and with it their easy friendship. Therefore, the 1 mirroring of this tale with the first acts as closure for the Alice tales, ending her tale as they began: with Alice returning to reality. Despite this use of narrative structuring, Carroll leaves his readers with an unanswered question: if Alice was the dreamer of the first tale, who dreamt the second? Consequently, the description of Alice as a “dream-child”, undermining her strength within the Looking-Glass world, and Tweedledee’s comment that it is the Red King who is “dreaming now” suggest that it is in fact Red King is in control of this dream, and that Alice is simply a figment of his imagination. “I know they’re talking nonsense.” When first posed with the topic of whether she might be a “dream-child” of the Red King’s, Alice shouts “I am real!” in tears as “it all seemed so ridiculous”; Alice is convinced that she is not a dream and she has total control over her surroundings, and therefore she must be the one dreaming her adventure. Her adventure into this mirror world, structured to follow the conventional form of chess, a game she was playing before entering the Looking-Glass, is started and ended by her. Alice is the one to break the illusion, placing the Red King in check and shaking the Red Queen back into a kitten. The more logical setting of this tale is reminiscent of Alice’s maturity and how it has increased since the first tale. Furthermore, Alice’s thoughts and opinions are discussed throughout, suggesting that she is in fact the dreamer as it would be impossible for the Red King to know Alice in this depth. When the Tweedle brothers tease Alice, connoting that she is a fictional creation of the Red King’s illusions, she muses that “it all seemed so ridiculous.” This use of Alice’s thoughts, her strong-willed actions throughout the book, 1 BBC (2009). Article written by J.Curran, Oxford History: “Local Lives – Alice Liddell” [Online] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/oxford/content/articles/2009/05/21/alice_feature.shtml