Previous
Chapters 9-10: Queen Alice; Shaking
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Through the Looking-Glass, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Youth, Identity, and Growing Up
Adulthood and the Adult World
Rules and Etiquette
Sense, Nonsense, and Language
Summary
Analysis
The Red Queen turns into Kitty and Alice wakes up. Alice scolds the kitten for waking her up and tells Kitty that she was in her dream. Kitty purrs at Alice as Alice digs through her chessmen for the Red Queen. She asks Kitty to confirm that she turned into the Red Queen, but Kitty refuses. Alice kisses Kitty anyway. She turns to Snowdrop, still in the middle of a bath, and asks when Dinah will be done. She suggests that the White Queen was so unkempt in her dream because Snowdrop was getting a bath. Alice asks Dinah if she turned into Humpty Dumpty. She then tells Kitty that she heard lots of poetry about fish and asks for Kitty's opinion: whose dream was it, Alice's or the Red King's? Kitty ignores Alice and the narrator asks the reader for their opinion.
Now that Alice is awake and back in her world, she's able to try to make sense of her dream without getting criticized for it—but, as in her dream, it's impossible to make total sense of a dream like this, even if the cats are logical suspects for the Red and White Queens. This attempt—and the attempt to figure out if the dream was Alice's dream or the Red King's—reads again as something that, like many of the philosophical questions posed by the novel, is fun to think about but not something to take too seriously. Punting the question to the reader encourages them to take this lesson and apply it to their own life.
Themes
Literary Devices
