Essay: Alice in Wonderland

I chose the Alice and Wonderland unit for this week because I wanted to refresh my knowledge on this fantastic classic! When I a freshman in high school, I remember that was my first time actually reading the story for myself. It was so weird and random but their symbolism was what really drew me in. For about a month I analyzed the story for my own benefit just to determine why Lewis Carol wrote a story with such a ‘farfetched’ theme and storyline for the time. I remember reading that he wrote the story for his children or grandchildren. I heard another version of a story I found was interesting because in the story everything is the same except Alice is older and took some type of drug so she began to hallucinate. The cheesier cat is actually her conscious and tells her to kill everyone in wonderland. When she wakes up, she realizes she actually killed real people. I also remember one of my friends saying that he did a bunch of psychedelics while writing his book, but that is more than likely untrue. Having all this knowledge of the story of Alice and Wonderland caused me to be even more interested in because there were so many weird things associated it that caught my interest.

            The story itself is a fantastic classic that I believe everyone should read at some point in his or her life. It is a story that both children and adults would love because the story seems to make no sense for our world but for Wonderlands rules, it made all the sense in the world. It lets all people, no matter how old, extend one’s creative mind and think of things outside the box of our rules in our world.  I am very glad this unit had this story and I hope people who had never read it before were able to take the opportunity to do so this week since it is such a great novel!

Alice in Wonderland by Jessie Willcox Smith (1923)