Question

In Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, answer the following questions:

a) What does Alice think of Humpty Dumpty?
b) What bargain did the King promise Humpty Dumpty if he falls?
c) When Alice asks why Humpty Dumpty sits there all alone, what does he say?
d) What is the proper way to serve a looking glass cake, and how does this relate to the looking glass world as a whole?
e) In this chapter, the King talks about an animal twice. This is the same animal mentioned earlier in the book. What is it?

Answer 1

Alice finds Humpty Dumpty peculiar and self-important, especially when he explains the poem 'Jabberwocky' and fails, as his literal translations remove the poem's beauty and mystery, committing the 'heresy of paraphrase'.

Step-by-step explanation:

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice thinks of Humpty Dumpty as a rather self-important and peculiar character who has a high opinion of his own knowledge. This can be especially seen in his confidence in explaining and translating poems, even those that have not been invented, which Alice requests for the poem 'Jabberwocky'. Unfortunately, Humpty Dumpty's interpretations end up stripping the poem of its beauty, as he commits the 'heresy of paraphrase' by attempting to provide literal meanings to the nonsensical words, thereby destroying the possibilities and the imaginative space that the poem originally provides. When Humpty Dumpty explains that he would make words mean different things, he is disregarding the poetic form and its interplay with the content, which is a commentary on literary analysis itself. Ironically, this interpretation causes him to split the form from the content, much like Humpty Dumpty's literal fall that splits his form and content, a 'well-wrought urn of nonsense'.