Alices Adventures in Wonderland - Book Report/Review Example

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Alice, the little girl who found herself bored one day while sitting with her sister - wondered about the use of reading a book (that her sister was reading) that had no "pictures and conversations" on it. She more than got a book that had more that had fantastic creatures for "picture" and riddles for "conversations when she followed the white Rabbit and came to Wonderland. Like a little imperialist, Alice most of the time forgot that she was merely a visitor in Wonderland for she would get exasperated when things there did not conform to her expectations, according to her own values and knowledge. More significantly, she did not realize that even her innocent ways of giving advice of what will be good and sensible in situations did not fit the situations or how logic/illogic works in Wonderland. She would impose her ways of thinking on the creatures she would meet, forgetting that to understand them in this way would really lead towards frustration and sometimes, violence. If taken as a metaphor for imperialist behavior of the British Empire or the United States towards other countries, for example - the consequences of Alice's way of thinking are made clear. Also in the novel, Alice would sometimes shrink in size or grow bigger, but no matter how she tried she somehow didn't fit in with nor the understand the ways of the creatures. The message seemed to be that size is not what matters, but the ability to understand where a creature or individual is coming from is the key thing in order to understand creatures or people different from oneself. In the chapter "Advice from a Caterpillar", Alice encountered a caterpillar smoking a hookah over a mushroom whom she asks for advice on how to get bigger. The caterpillar told her that unlike Alice, it does not bother him to metamorphose or to change sizes - and the caterpillar was "contemptuous" of Alice's complaints. Indeed when taken into the context of understanding other people, other countries or other cultures, the caterpillar made sense. For one, it doesn't matter to the caterpillar that one day he'll be a worm, next a pupa and next a butterfly - to him whatever form, he is in, he is still the same creature. On the contrary, like Alice pointing to the caterpillar that his metamorphosis should appear queer to him, the West or the Western countries seem to revel in pointing the "difference" or the exotic-ness of Asia or the Islamic countries. What does it matter that Muslims pray in a mosque and that five times a day they pray facing Mecca Is it not the same Christians go to their churches, no matter what form they are in Later when Alice was able to make herself grow taller by eating a part of the mushroom, there was a moment when her neck grew so long that a pigeon mistakenly took her for a serpent. When the United States, for example took part in the Vietnam War and took its military might and power apparently to the save the land for communism, -- Vietnam's nationalists however saw America not as a savior, but as an enemy. It seems when a person is in a place where he or she is not supposed to be, the locals would judge them as either as an intruder or an enemy - even if the opposite may be the case (as Alice tells the pigeon - "I--- I'm a little girl.") In the chapter "Pig and Pepper", the Duchess holding her baby told Alice who was as usual bewildered with another situation she got into - "You don't know much, and that's a fact." Indeed Alice, like the know-it-all, bleeding heart that she was, found herself shocked at how the cook and the Duchess seemed to abuse and be violent to the baby and thus Alice, found no choice but to interfere out of concern for the baby. Instead the Duchess told her off - "If everybody minded their own business, the world would go down a deal faster than it does." The situation could be likened to what is now happening to Iraq, where violence had only escalated as a result of the West's interference to weed out Saddam Hussein and to stamp out what it calls terrorists. More people are dying now in Iraq and more violently than when Saddam was in power. Probably, if Bush and Blair only looked a little bit closely into the Iraq situation, as Alice did into the baby she was so concerned about - well, they would realize that it was not a human baby as she thought, it was a pig. "Piggy" situations as the cook and the Duchess asserted call for piggy solutions - and these two apparently careless characters displayed far more sense than Alice did. Alice's adventures came to a head when she went to a tea-party - a party which impishly noted the March Hare she wasn't invited, and then on to a mock-serious trial, presided by the King of Hearts to find out "who stole the tarts". Ironically, Alice saw that the table for tea was a large one - and yet the Hatter, March Hare and the Dormouse all cried when they saw her - "no room, no room!" The creatures indulged her, when she indignantly told them that there's plenty of room. It is very much like when imperialists go to a land which they see as having a plenty - such as when the Europeans went to the East to gather all the spices and the spoils for themselves, but of course the natives see them as intrusive, uninvited spoilers of their land. While as the creatures told Alice that she should mean what she say - Alice pompously told them that at least unlike them, she says what she means, making it clear that she did not figure out yet the riddles. When she could not understand the seemingly pointless trial of figuring out "who stole the tarts" she grew to a gigantic size, only driving home the point that even though that she was larger than these creatures, she did not get the point that in their own ways they have their own internal logic, no matter that to an outsider it seemed senseless - or as Alice, all them, were like "pack of cards". Read More