Lewis Carroll's Wordplay : In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

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We have looked into Lewis Carroll's play on words in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. We have described his wordplay in four chapters... the phonological, semantic, and syntactic aspects and the aspect of expression, respectively. No wordplay proves effective unless we can recognize it and fully appreciate the author's intention, and at times some wordplays seem to require more or less explanation. In the case of the two works examined, we have here, we have dealt with a salient and complicated kind of nonsense, intended for the British contemporary readers. So it is necessary to know a great many things underlying his expressions if we want to appreciate their full wit and flavor. In the Victorian age, people lived under the constraint of various rules and morals. Needless to say, a number of rules are indispensable to make the world go round smoothly. But Carroll regarded them as so cumbersome that he intended to set this readers free from these constraints by means of his characters in two works, hinting at his cynical outlook of the age. This is an instance of his irony put into the mouth of Humpty Dumpty in Though the Looking Glass, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean-neither or less... The question is which is to be master-that's all.' To put it another way, the question is whether we use a word or we are used by a word. The former way of thinking ignores the fact that a speaker and a listener cooperate with each other, which is apt to lead to a breakdown of communication. Smooth communication is not necessarily equal to conventional language. What is important is that many characters and episodes in these two works are the outcome of puns and other linguistic jokes.
甲南女子大学の論文
2003-03-18

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中島香織
甲南女子大学大学院英文学専攻

Lewis Carroll's Wordplay : In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

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