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Explanation and Analysis:
Through the Looking-Glass, along with the other Alice novels, helped popularize the genre of nonsense literature. This does not mean that the novel does not make any sense. Nonsense literature as a genre uses an array of playful literary devices to challenge logical frameworks and make light of things society usually takes as a given. Often, the "nonsense" in nonsense literature is playful on the surface, but closer examination can yield deeper philosophical meaning. At the end of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is crowned Queen and must host a dinner party. Everything imaginable and unimaginable goes wrong. She can't serve the mutton because the mutton is alive. The Red Queen won't stop backseat hosting. The guests climb into the serving dishes, and the serving utensils come alive to cause problems. This is all overwhelming to Alice and charmingly silly to the reader. Alice cannot make sense of what is happening, and her frustration at the nonsense leads her to wake up from her dream.
While it is possible to simply laugh and put the book aside at this point, it is also possible to sit with Alice's feeling of disorientation and let it bring up legitimate criticism of Victorian society. Why are the rules of etiquette at dinner parties important? Who do they serve? What makes a good dinner party guest? Alice is frustrated by the unreasonableness of what happens at her dinner party, but what makes the rules she knows more reasonable? Nonsense literature invites readers to challenge the very notion of what "makes sense," which can make it at once pleasurable to read and incredibly incisive. Alice's attempt throughout the novel to understand "Jabberwocky" is itself a lesson to the reader in how to read nonsense. Only when Alice and the reader both give up trying to decode the poem can they start to see it as a lighthearted critique of serious poetry and of stories about heroes and adventure. Sometimes, Carroll suggests, poetry and adventures are sillier and less meaningful than we try to make them.
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