Rabbit Hole

• “down the rabbit hole”, a metaphor for adventure into the unknown, from its use in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• a slang expression for a psychedelic experience, from the same usage
• ARG, Alternative Reality Game(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game#Unique_terminology) –
• TING, This is not a game

• Literary nonsense

  • these supernatural phenomena are not nonsensical if they have a discernible logic supporting their existence
  • has no system of logic, although it may imply the existence of an inscrutable one, just beyond our grasp.

• Eating and devouring[edit]

  Carina Garland notes how the world is “expressed via representations of food and appetite”, naming Alice’s frequent desire for consumption (of both food and words), her ‘Curious Appetites’.^[26] Often, the idea of eating coincides to make gruesome images. After the riddle “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”, the Hatter claims that Alice might as well say, “I see what I eat…I eat what I see” and so the riddle’s solution, put forward by Boe Birns,^[27] could be that “A raven eats worms; a writing desk is worm-eaten”; this idea of food encapsulates idea of life feeding on life, for the worm is being eaten and then becomes the eater  – a horrific image of mortality.

  Nina Auerbach discusses how the novel revolves around eating and drinking which “motivates much of her [Alice’s] behaviour”, for the story is essentially about things “entering and leaving her mouth”^[28] The animals of Wonderland are of particular interest, for Alice’s relation to them shifts constantly because, as Lovell-Smith states, Alice’s changes in size continually reposition her in the food chain, serving as a way to make her acutely aware of the ‘eat or be eaten’ attitude that permeates Wonderland.^[29]

•  How Doth the Little Crocodile

  • How doth the little crocodile

    Improve his shining tail,

    And pour the waters of the Nile

    On every golden scale!

    How cheerfully he seems to grin,

    How neatly spreads his claws,

    And welcomes little fishes in

    With gently smiling jaws!

• The effect of nonsense is often caused by an excess of meaning, rather than a lack of it.