#3: Why Is A Raven Like A Writing Desk?

I simply love Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". I love everything about the whimsical world he created where nothing is what it's supposed to be, a place where croquet is played with flamingos and porcupines and the Mock Turtle dances with the Gryphon to the Lobster Quadrille. 

Carroll takes every logical thing and twists everything around, turning tears into oceans and making parodies of  nursery rhymes which turned out to be more famous than the actual nursery rhyme itself. An example of a parody done by Carroll in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is entitled "How Doth The Little Crocodile", which is a parody of a poem by Isaac Watts for children, "Against Idleness and Mischief".

Disney's animated film adaptation "Alice in Wonderland"

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 creative way Carroll is able to come up with parodies amplifies the uniqueness of this book. The parody of Watt's poem takes the originally moralistic values of the busy bee and turns it into a poem of deception and and predation, a recurrent theme in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".

Carroll also came up with amazingly memorable quotes, quotes that just sticks with you, quotes that make you think that maybe, just maybe, you could live in a world of your own. He came up with riddles without answers and all these are what makes this book so memorable. Loony characters such as the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts and the Caterpillarall play vital roles in making what the book is, an amazing piece of literary nonsense.

(So someone I know had this theory that Carroll might have been stoned when he came up with this story but that's just beside the point.)

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?" - Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

References:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland

How Doth The Little Crocodile. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Doth_the_Little_Crocodile