Through The Looking Glass

The theme of transformation, though apparent throughout the story, is most relevant in the ending. Every companion in Alice’s waking life has similar characteristics to those she met in her dream life. Kitty was the Red Queen since she is the most uncontrollable kitten Alice has ever had. The white kitten Snowdrop was the White Queen, with hints that she is similarly messy and unkempt since the mother cat was cleaning her before Alice fell asleep. Even Dinah, the mother cat, equates to Humpty Dumpty, Alice thinks, because she teaches her kittens lessons, as Humpty taught Alice the meaning of the Jabberwocky poem. The clues about the similarities between her kittens and their counterparts in the looking-glass land recall the way the subconscious takes waking experiences and transforms them into dreams, as well as the way the imagination takes the concrete experiences of everyday life and transforms them. Alice’s insistence that her cats were the characters from her dream reveals that she has learned to believe in the truths that underlie the fantastic.

In the novel’s finale, Carroll intentionally breaks the fourth wall to create an ambiguous, profound ending for readers to ponder. As with a few other select times in the book, he addresses the reader directly: “‘You see, Kitty, 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!’ [...] Which do you think it was?” (196). Though the narrator asks who dreamed the story, Alice or the Red King, the question also implies that the dream was real. The ending prompts the reader to consider in what sense the looking-glass land was real, and in what sense dreams and imagination are real. In a sense, Alice is right, the kittens were the figures from her dream: The characters from her dream represent her perceptions of their personalities. The looking-glass world allowed her to process reality through her imagination, and the ending suggests that her imagined world was as rooted in truth as the real one, though its relationship to truth is different. The book’s final question posits that everything that has just happened is someone’s dream, but implies that the fact that it was a dream does not make it less real or meaningful. By asking the reader to believe in dreams and imagination as earnestly as Alice, the ending suggests that growth and maturity should incorporate rather than eschew the power of imagination.