Chapter: Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the
bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the
book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in
it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or
conversations?'

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the
hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure
of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and
picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran
close by her.

There was nothing so VERY remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so
VERY much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, 'Oh dear!
Oh dear! I shall be late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it
occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time
it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually TOOK A WATCH
OUT OF ITS WAISTCOAT-POCKET, and looked at it, and then hurried on,
Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had
never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch
to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field
after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large
rabbit-hole under the hedge.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how
in the world she was to get out again.

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then
dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think
about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep
well.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had
plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was
going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what
she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she
looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with
cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures
hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as
she passed; it was labelled 'ORANGE MARMALADE', but to her great
disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear
of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as
she fell past it.

'Well!' thought Alice to herself, 'after such a fall as this, I shall
think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at
home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top
of the house!' (Which was very likely true.)

Down, down, down. Would the fall NEVER come to an end! 'I wonder how
many miles I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud. 'I must be getting
somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four
thousand miles down, I think--' (for, you see, Alice had learnt several
things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this
was not a VERY good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there
was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over)
'--yes, that's about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude
or Longitude I've got to?' (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or
Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)

Presently she began again. 'I wonder if I shall fall right THROUGH the
earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with
their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad
there WAS no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the
right word) '--but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country
is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?' (and
she tried to curtsey as she spoke--fancy CURTSEYING as you're falling
through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) 'And what an
ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to
ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.'

Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began
talking again. 'Dinah'll miss me very much to-night, I should think!'
(Dinah was the cat.) 'I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at
tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no
mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very
like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?' And here Alice
began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy
sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do
bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question,
it didn't much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing
off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with
Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, 'Now, Dinah, tell me the truth:
did you ever eat a bat?' when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon
a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.

Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment:
she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another
long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it.
There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and
was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, 'Oh my ears
and whiskers, how late it's getting!' She was close behind it when she
turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found
herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging
from the roof.

There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when
Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every
door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to
get out again.

Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid
glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's
first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall;
but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small,
but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second
time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and
behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the
little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not
much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage
into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of
that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and
those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the
doorway; 'and even if my head would go through,' thought poor Alice, 'it
would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could
shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.'
For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately,
that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really
impossible.

There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went
back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at
any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this
time she found a little bottle on it, ('which certainly was not here
before,' said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper
label, with the words 'DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large
letters.

It was all very well to say 'Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was
not going to do THAT in a hurry. 'No, I'll look first,' she said, 'and
see whether it's marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice
little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild
beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember
the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot
poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your
finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never
forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison,' it is
almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

However, this bottle was NOT marked 'poison,' so Alice ventured to taste
it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour
of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot
buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.


'What a curious feeling!' said Alice; 'I must be shutting up like a
telescope.'

And so it was indeed: she was now only ten inches high, and her face
brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going
through the little door into that lovely garden. First, however, she
waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further:
she felt a little nervous about this; 'for it might end, you know,' said
Alice to herself, 'in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder
what I should be like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a
candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember
ever having seen such a thing.

After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going
into the garden at once; but, alas for poor Alice! when she got to the
door, she found she had forgotten the little golden key, and when she
went back to the table for it, she found she could not possibly reach
it: she could see it quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her
best to climb up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery;
and when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing
sat down and cried.

'Come, there's no use in crying like that!' said Alice to herself,
rather sharply; 'I advise you to leave off this minute!' She generally
gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it),
and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into
her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having
cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself,
for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.
'But it's no use now,' thought poor Alice, 'to pretend to be two people!
Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make ONE respectable person!'

Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table:
she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words
'EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. 'Well, I'll eat it,' said
Alice, 'and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it
makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll
get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, 'Which way? Which
way?', holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was
growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same
size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice
had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way
things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on
in the common way.

So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.

 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland begins as a pleasant fairy tale. Alice and her sister are reading a book that has neither pictures nor conversations. Alice finds the reading tedious; she is anxious for more vivid and direct forms of experience. Her boredom and anxiety cause her to withdraw from the "civilized pastime" of reading dull books and to fall to sleep, entering the world of dreams. At the edge of semi-sleep consciousness, she sees the form of a white rabbit scurrying toward a rabbit-hole. Immediately, Alice is curious and pursues him down the hole. The reason for Alice's pursuit is that she burns with curiosity; after all, the rabbit is wearing a waistcoat, talking to himself, walking upright, and he has a pocket watch; his image is thus unusual, suggesting romantic and fairy tale "people." The rabbit's hole functions like a large laundry chute, and, curiously, Alice "floats" down the hole in a slow descent. In her fall, she has fantasies relating to the absence of gravity, the quality of infinite space, the shape of her body, mass, and velocity. Her free, fanciful associations in the tunnel are in vivid contrast to her innocent, non-reflective curiosity that led her to leap down the hole in the first place. In fact, her leap downward probably was unconscious. Not once did she hesitate for fear of what she might find or consider how she might get out. Her leap was a leap in a spirit of adventure, a reckless gamble done for fun. On the other hand, Alice retains her belief in the world above-ground. There are shelves lining the walls of the tunnel, and on one shelf she finds a jar of orange marmalade. Things like the jar reaffirm her feelings that matters are not "too different" here, so she refuses to accept that her experience of floating down a rabbit-hole is unlike previous, curious adventures that she has had. This is just another adventure, and fancying that she might well be headed through the earth's center, she wonders how to determine her latitude and longitude. Note that it doesn't seem to matter to her that such terms do not apply under the earth's surface. Then, Alice considers the prospect of emerging head downward in New Zealand or Australia; her concern is almost a caricature of her childish belief in the impossible. Strangely enough, there is no indication that she is truly disoriented; everything seems true to sense in spite of the absence of acceleration and gravity. Even her "sense of propriety" is functioning. She returns the empty marmalade jar to a lower shelf for fear that to drop it might injure someone below. Then, in an imaginary conversation with a woman whom she might meet on the other side of the world, she manages to curtsy in mid-air. Yet, already she is beginning to suffer nostalgia for her life in the conscious, above-ground world. The frightening possibility of being trapped in a dream occurs to her. Above-ground, her cat Dinah had an appetite for bats, and Alice is suddenly confronted by the thought that, possibly, bats may also eat cats! The age-old questions of eating, or being eaten, poses itself here in the context of an alien world while Alice is falling, falling . . . to heaven knows where. Wonderland is one of the most spontaneous "places" in this novel. And suddenly Alice is in Wonderland! She has landed safely at the bottom of her long, slow fall. But, immediately, she hears the White Rabbit's anxious lament: "Oh, my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!" Alice then loses sight of the rabbit in a hall that is paneled with doors. None of them, however, seems to be the right size for even a young girl of Alice's size; in fact, they are "strange doors." They seem to have a foreboding, funereal feeling about them. Thus, she does not attempt to open them. On a glass table, though, she finds a tiny golden key, and this key opens a small, curtained door; but the entrance-way is small, rat-sized, in fact, and Alice cannot fit even her head through the doorway. And the door leads to a beautifully colorful, seemingly "enchanted garden." Alice wishes so very much that she could reduce her size and could explore the garden. Her wish that she could reverse her size is consistent with the logic of fantasy. Already, as the narrator observes, ". . . so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that few things indeed were really impossible." On the glass table, Alice finds a little bottle. It seems to have just magically appeared. The label on the bottle reads "DRINK ME." It is against her previous, proper English training to eat or drink strange foods, but curiosity proves a stronger compulsion than doing the "right thing." So she drinks the liquid and is reduced immediately; now she can pass through the doorway leading to the garden! But she forgot to take the key before she drank the liquid, and now she has shrunk down to a tiny little girl. Disheartened that she can no longer reach the key, Alice begins to cry. Then there is a curious change in her attitude. She stops herself from crying, as though her "selfish self" has been detached from her "proper self" and the latter is scolding her for crying. We almost hear her mother's voice: A desire for something right now is childish; it is "narcissistic" -- selfish. It is naughty, and little girls shouldn't be selfish and want things right now. Thus, Alice restrains herself from crying. Suddenly, a little glass box appears with a cake inside it . On the cake, there is a sign: "EAT ME." Alice eats the cake, but there is no immediate consequence. To her dismay, life is dull once again; it seems as though she has not really left the above-ground world at all. She feels that she is the same frustrated little girl that she was before. Except now there's an additional problem. When she was a normal-sized girl, she could not get out of the passageway, and now that she is too small, she has no means to escape. So there she sits, an enclosed soul, trapped in the traumatic nightmare of a prison cell. Already logic has begun to break down in this confusing, claustrophobic condition. Life is beginning to become exaggerated. Alice feels that she can't trust her sanity; curiosity seems to have taken its place. Thus, here in this introduction, rational expectations have taken Alice to an illogical and fantastic destination.

