Why Alice in Wonderland Is More Relevant to Adults Than Ever.

Some books feel like old friends we can return to at any age, only to find they have more secrets to share. Alice in Wonderland is a masterpiece of this kind. Often dismissed as simple children's literature, its depths are perhaps even more profound when viewed through an adult lens. Its author, Lewis Carroll, managed to weave complex, absurd ideas into a child's fairy tale, creating a story that explores not just whimsical characters but the very foundations of how our language and thinking work.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English mathematician, Oxford professor, and clergyman. A notably reserved man, Dodgson found a unique comfort in the company of children. He created his most famous work for a young girl named Alice, the daughter of his university's Vice-Chancellor, spinning fantastical tales for her during their walks. At her request, he wrote them down, and years later, he followed it with Through the Looking-Glass, continuing the heroine’s strange adventures.

The philosopher Umberto Eco once suggested there are two types of readers. The first, the "empirical reader," dives into a story for the plot alone, swept away by the current of events. The second, the "ideal reader," recognizes the author’s craft, seeing how the text is built to evoke specific thoughts and feelings. As children, we are almost always empirical readers, lost in the magic of Wonderland. Let's revisit this tale, however, as ideal readers, and see what truly lies beneath the surface.

A Fairy Tale Turned on Its Head

At first glance, Alice in Wonderland appears to borrow from the classic fairy tales that were popular in 19th-century Europe. Romantics celebrated these stories for their mythic perception of the world, seeing a kind of truth in their ancient structures. But Carroll takes these familiar structures and masterfully subverts them.

Alice’s adventure begins abruptly, without the traditional fairy-tale opening where a hero is driven by misfortune or a great need. The cause-and-effect logic that usually connects one event to the next is almost entirely absent; each new chapter feels spontaneous and unpredictable. In a classic tale, the hero often encounters a wise figure who offers a magical item or crucial advice, but only after a series of trials. Alice also meets characters who give her things, like the Caterpillar or the White Rabbit, but she completes no real tests to earn them. She gets what she needs anyway, and the gift-givers themselves seem unaware of their role. This is a key element of the book’s unique absurdity: Carroll keeps the skeletons of old fairy-tale rules but strips them of their conventional meaning.

The text itself is remarkably theatrical. Carroll wastes little time on detailed descriptions of scenery or appearances. Instead, he focuses on action and dialogue, punctuated by Alice's own reflective monologues. The verbal spars in this story are a masterclass in drama, where every word can be a move in an absurd game or a clever play on a well-known phrase. To compensate for the lack of description, the book was conceived with illustrations from the start. The drawings, whether by the original illustrator John Tenniel or a surrealist like Salvador Dalí, are essential to bringing the world to life.

The Curious Logic of a Broken Clock

As a professor of mathematical logic, it’s no surprise that Carroll embedded logical paradoxes into the very fabric of his story. We might assume Wonderland is a world of pure chaos, but that isn’t quite right. Its world is different from ours not just because animals talk, but because the fundamental laws of our logic do not apply there.

This doesn't mean it has no logic at all—it simply has a different one. For instance, the Mad Hatter explains that it is always six o’clock at their tea party. This isn't random; it's because he "murdered the time" while singing for the Queen of Hearts. In response, Time (personified as a ‘He’) became offended and is now frozen for the Hatter. Carroll didn't just invent a magical world; he meticulously constructed its paradoxical logic, which remains internally consistent. If time has stopped in the story, it truly does not move for those characters.

When Words Lose Their Meaning

The most striking philosophical exploration in the book is its treatment of language. Carroll wasn't just creating nonsense words and funny rhymes; he was demonstrating the limits of our own thought. The entire text is a series of games—croquet, cards, chess—and for Carroll, language is just another game with rules that can be bent and broken.

Decades later, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would argue that the meaning of a word depends entirely on its context or "game." Carroll illustrates this perfectly. When Alice tries to communicate with the residents of Wonderland, they constantly tell her that her speech is incorrect. She is forced to question her understanding of the world she has fallen into. This is especially clear during the Mad Tea Party. When the March Hare tells Alice to "have some wine," she sees there is none on the table and replies that she can't have any. The Hare retorts, "It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited." The logic is skewed, but it follows its own rules of social offense.

We are used to words having stable functions, but this is merely a habit. The story reveals that the link between a word and its meaning is arbitrary. There is no inherent connection between the letters t-a-b-l-e and the physical object we call a table; we simply agree that this is what the word means. In Wonderland, this social contract is broken.

This breakdown sometimes takes on an existential weight. Alice is constantly faced with the question of her own identity. The White Rabbit mistakes her for his maid, Mary Ann. The Pigeon insists she must be a serpent because she has a long neck and eats eggs. The most telling moment is her exchange with the Caterpillar, who asks the blunt question, "Who are you?" Alice finds she cannot answer. In a world with a different logic, our usual methods of communication and self-definition fail. Alice is an outsider, and so she cannot understand the inhabitants of Wonderland, nor can they understand her.

What we call "absurdity" in the book is not meaninglessness. It is the game that results from our attempt to apply our logic to a world that operates on another. Carroll built a world with its own, clearly defined internal rules. The absurdity is the friction between its world and ours. In doing so, he helps us see the logic of our own language more clearly, revealing that our own world, with all its conventions, is also a kind of game. We just happen to know the rules.

References

• Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell Publishing.

  This foundational work of 20th-century philosophy argues that words derive their meaning from their use within a given "language-game." This directly supports the article's point about the communication breakdowns in Wonderland, where Alice’s language-games (from her world) do not match those of the inhabitants. Wittgenstein’s idea that we are "held captive" by a picture and cannot get outside it is powerfully illustrated by Alice’s predicament (e.g., see sections §7, §23, §115).

• Gardner, M. (Ed.). (2000). The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. W. W. Norton & Company.

  This comprehensive edition contains the full text of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with extensive margin notes by Martin Gardner. These notes explain the mathematical puzzles, logical paradoxes, wordplay, and Victorian social references that Carroll embedded in the text. It provides direct evidence for the claim that Wonderland operates on a complex, albeit different, internal logic, rather than being pure nonsense.

• Eco, U. (1979). The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana University Press.

  This book explores how readers actively participate in creating the meaning of a text. Eco's concept of the "Model Reader" (or Ideal Reader, as mentioned in the article's source) is central here. He discusses how "open texts" like Carroll's invite readers to become co-creators of the narrative's meaning, filling in gaps and interpreting ambiguities, which aligns with the article's premise that rereading Alice as an adult offers a richer, more interpretive experience.