What Alice Found There Language Analysis

The vagueness of language is referenced in other ways as well, mostly by the comments made by secondary characters. For example, in the lines, “… the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable –” the Mouse is interrupted by the Duck with the line, “Found what?” To this, the Mouse can only reply, “Found it,” and the Duck is left to conclude that the Mouse must mean a frog or a worm, as those are the objects he most commonly refers to with the word it. Similarly, when the Wonderland creatures and Alice find themselves needing to be dried off after swimming, they cannot understand why they do not become dry when one of them tells “the driest story they know.”
Carroll’s satire of the English language not only offers his own opinion about the unavoidable miscommunications that are bound to happen as a result of the flawed language itself, but also makes the case that Wonderland and the Looking Glass land make more sense than the “real world,” due to their precision of language. If this is true, then it would appear that Alice is in fact the “crazy” one in Wonderland and the Looking Glass land, because she comes from a world in which language is used loosely and precision in language is not enforced. This is a notion that seems …show more content…
Because the poem says they must fight over a rattle, when the two of them spot a rattle in the forest, they have no other choice but to fight one another, even though both acknowledge they would rather let the other have the rattle than go to the trouble of fighting each other for it (Spacks). It seems that Carroll gave words a sort of power in the Looking Glass land, perhaps to remind its audience to pay attention to the words and names they give to things, as words have a power of their own that is stronger than one may