Through the Looking Glass
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Author
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Illustrator
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Modern Illustrated Classics-91
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Country
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Delhi
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Language
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English
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Genre
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Publisher
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Rohan Book Company
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Publication date
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2003
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Characters
Main
characters
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Summary
Through the Looking Glass
Alice was very imaginative and loved to
talk to her kittens. She had a looking glass house. One day she visited and
crossed the glass, that she was able to step through it to an alternative world. Alice entering the Looking Glass. In
this reflected version of her own house, she found a book with looking glass
poetry, "Jabberwocky", she
did not understand the language. Then she realized that the text must be
reversed since she was in the looking glass world, so she hold the book up to
the glass. The text was revealed to be the poem Jabberwocky, the language of
which she still did not understand. Alice, feeling like she will not have time
to see everything if she lingers, floats downstairs and out the door to explore
the garden.
Upon
leaving the house, she entered sunny spring garden where the flowers have the
power of human speech; they perceived Alice as being a "flower that can
move about." Elsewhere in the garden, Alice met the Red Queen, who impressed Alice with her ability to run
at breathtaking speeds a
referenced to the chess rule
that queens
were able to move any number of vacant squares at once, in any direction,
making them the most agile of the pieces. The Red Queen reveals to Alice that
the entire countryside was laid out in squared like a gigantic chessboard, and
offers to make Alice a queen if she can move all the way to the eighth rank/row in a chess match.
Alice is placed in the second
rank as one of the White Queen's pawns, and begins her journey across the chessboard by boarding a
train that literally jumped over the third row and directly into the fourth rank, acting on the rule that
pawns can advance two spaces on their first move.
Then
Alice met the twin brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledee, whom she knew from the famous nursery
rhyme. After reciting the long poem
"The Walrus and the Carpenter", the Tweedles draw Alice's attention to the Red King, loudly snoring away under a nearby tree and maliciously
provoke her with idle philosophical banter that she exists
only as an imaginary figure in the
Red King's dreams. Finally, the brothers began acting out their nursery-rhyme
by suiting up for battle, only to be frightened away by an enormous crow, as
the nursery rhyme about them predicts.
Alice
next met the White Queen, who is very absent minded but boasts of her ability to remember
future events before they have happened. Alice
and the White Queen advanced into the chessboard's fifth rank by crossing over a brook together, but at the very
moment of the crossing, the Queen transforms into a talking
Sheep in a small
shop. Alice soon finds herself
struggling to handle the oars of a small rowboat, where the Sheep annoys her
with (seemingly) nonsensical shouting about "crabs" and "feathers".
After
crossing yet another brook into the sixth
rank, Alice immediately encounters Humpty
Dumpty, who, besides celebrating his unbirthday, provided his own translation of the strange terms in
"Jabberwocky" before his inevitable fall. "All the king's horses
and all the king's men" come to Humpty Dumpty's assistance, naturally, and
are accompanied by the White King along with the Lion and the Unicorn, who again proceed to act out a nursery rhyme by fighting
each other. In this chapter, the March
Hare and Hatter make a brief re-appearance in the guise of "Anglo-Saxon messengers" called "Haigha" and
"Hatta".
Upon
leaving the Lion and Unicorn to their fight, Alice reached the seventh rank by crossing another brook
into the forested territory of the Red Knight, who was intent on capturing the
"white pawn" Alice until the White Knight came to her rescue. Escorting her through the forest
towards the final brook crossing, the Knight recites
a long poem of his own composition, and
repeatedly falls off his horse his clumsiness was a reference to the
"eccentric" L-shaped movements of chess knights.
Bidding
farewell to the White Knight, Alice step across the last brook and is
automatically crowned a queen (the crown materialising abruptly on her head).
She soon found herself in the company of both the White and Red Queens who
relentlessly confound Alice by using word
play to thwart her attempts at logical
discussion. They then invited one another to a party that will be hosted by the
newly crowned Alice (of which Alice herself had no prior knowledge). Alice
arrived and seats herself at her own party which quickly turns to a chaotic
uproar in which Alice finally grabs the Red Queen, believing her to be
responsible for all the day's nonsense, and begins shaking her violently with
all her might. By thus "capturing" the Red Queen, Alice unknowingly
puts the Red King who has remained stationary throughout the book into checkmate, and is allowed to wake up Alice suddenly awakes in her
armchair to find herself holding the black kitten, whom she deduces to have
been the Red Queen all along, with the white kitten having been the White
Queen. The story end with Alice recalling the speculation of the Tweedle
brothers, that everything may have, in fact, been a dream of the Red King and
that Alice might herself be no more than a figment of his imagination.
One final poem was inserted by the author as a sort of epilogue which suggests
that life itself is but a dream.
