Chapter: The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence:
at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed
her in a languid, sleepy voice.

'Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied,
rather shyly, 'I--I hardly know, sir, just at present--at least I know
who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been
changed several times since then.'

'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. 'Explain
yourself!'

'I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, 'because I'm not
myself, you see.'

'I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.

'I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely,
'for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many
different sizes in a day is very confusing.'

'It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.

'Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; 'but when you
have to turn into a chrysalis--you will some day, you know--and then
after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little
queer, won't you?'

'Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.

'Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice; 'all I know
is, it would feel very queer to ME.'

'You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. 'Who are YOU?'

Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation.
Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such VERY
short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, 'I think,
you ought to tell me who YOU are, first.'

'Why?' said the Caterpillar.

Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any
good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a VERY unpleasant
state of mind, she turned away.

'Come back!' the Caterpillar called after her. 'I've something important
to say!'

This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.

'Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar.

'Is that all?' said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she
could.

'No,' said the Caterpillar.

Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and
perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some
minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its
arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, 'So you think
you're changed, do you?'

'I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice; 'I can't remember things as I
used--and I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together!'

'Can't remember WHAT things?' said the Caterpillar.

'Well, I've tried to say "HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE," but it all came
different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.

'Repeat, "YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM,"' said the Caterpillar.

Alice folded her hands, and began:--

   'You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
    'And your hair has become very white;
   And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
    Do you think, at your age, it is right?'

   'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
    'I feared it might injure the brain;
   But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
    Why, I do it again and again.'

   'You are old,' said the youth, 'as I mentioned before,
    And have grown most uncommonly fat;
   Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door--
    Pray, what is the reason of that?'

   'In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
    'I kept all my limbs very supple
   By the use of this ointment--one shilling the box--
    Allow me to sell you a couple?'

   'You are old,' said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak
    For anything tougher than suet;
   Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
    Pray how did you manage to do it?'

   'In my youth,' said his father, 'I took to the law,
    And argued each case with my wife;
   And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
    Has lasted the rest of my life.'

   'You are old,' said the youth, 'one would hardly suppose
    That your eye was as steady as ever;
   Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
    What made you so awfully clever?'

   'I have answered three questions, and that is enough,'
    Said his father; 'don't give yourself airs!
   Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
    Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!'


'That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar.

'Not QUITE right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly; 'some of the words
have got altered.'

'It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly, and
there was silence for some minutes.

The Caterpillar was the first to speak.

'What size do you want to be?' it asked.

'Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied; 'only one
doesn't like changing so often, you know.'

'I DON'T know,' said the Caterpillar.

Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life
before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.

'Are you content now?' said the Caterpillar.

'Well, I should like to be a LITTLE larger, sir, if you wouldn't mind,'
said Alice: 'three inches is such a wretched height to be.'

'It is a very good height indeed!' said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing
itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

'But I'm not used to it!' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And
she thought of herself, 'I wish the creatures wouldn't be so easily
offended!'

'You'll get used to it in time,' said the Caterpillar; and it put the
hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In
a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth
and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the
mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went,
'One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you
grow shorter.'

'One side of WHAT? The other side of WHAT?' thought Alice to herself.

'Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it
aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.

Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying
to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly
round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she
stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit
of the edge with each hand.

'And now which is which?' she said to herself, and nibbled a little of
the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent
blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!

She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt
that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she
set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed
so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her
mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the
lefthand bit.


  *    *    *    *    *    *    *

    *    *    *    *    *    *

  *    *    *    *    *    *    *

'Come, my head's free at last!' said Alice in a tone of delight, which
changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders
were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was
an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a
sea of green leaves that lay far below her.

'What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. 'And where HAVE my
shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?'
She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow,
except a little shaking among the distant green leaves.

As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she
tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her
neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had
just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going
to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops
of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made
her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and
was beating her violently with its wings.

'Serpent!' screamed the Pigeon.

'I'm NOT a serpent!' said Alice indignantly. 'Let me alone!'

'Serpent, I say again!' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone,
and added with a kind of sob, 'I've tried every way, and nothing seems
to suit them!'

'I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' said Alice.

'I've tried the roots of trees, and I've tried banks, and I've tried
hedges,' the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; 'but those
serpents! There's no pleasing them!'

Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in
saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.

'As if it wasn't trouble enough hatching the eggs,' said the Pigeon;
'but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I
haven't had a wink of sleep these three weeks!'

'I'm very sorry you've been annoyed,' said Alice, who was beginning to
see its meaning.

'And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood,' continued the
Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, 'and just as I was thinking I
should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from
the sky! Ugh, Serpent!'

'But I'm NOT a serpent, I tell you!' said Alice. 'I'm a--I'm a--'

'Well! WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon. 'I can see you're trying to
invent something!'

'I--I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered
the number of changes she had gone through that day.

'A likely story indeed!' said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest
contempt. 'I've seen a good many little girls in my time, but never ONE
with such a neck as that! No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use
denying it. I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an
egg!'

'I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful
child; 'but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you
know.'

'I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; 'but if they do, why then they're
a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.'

This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a
minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, 'You're
looking for eggs, I know THAT well enough; and what does it matter to me
whether you're a little girl or a serpent?'

'It matters a good deal to ME,' said Alice hastily; 'but I'm not looking
for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn't want YOURS: I don't
like them raw.'

'Well, be off, then!' said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled
down again into its nest. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as
she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and
every now and then she had to stop and untwist it. After a while she
remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and
she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the
other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had
succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.

It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it
felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes,
and began talking to herself, as usual. 'Come, there's half my plan done
now! How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going
to be, from one minute to another! However, I've got back to my right
size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden--how IS that
to be done, I wonder?' As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open
place, with a little house in it about four feet high. 'Whoever lives
there,' thought Alice, 'it'll never do to come upon them THIS size: why,
I should frighten them out of their wits!' So she began nibbling at the
righthand bit again, and did not venture to go near the house till she
had brought herself down to nine inches high.

 Alice is well acquainted by now with the prime principle of Wonderland's chaos: illogic. Yet she continues -- almost by instinct -- to oppose the illogical context in which she continually finds herself. Yet her experience so far should have prepared her for the possibility that the "pebble-cake" might not have reduced her size. But as eating cake had worked that way once before, she expected the same results. And, indeed, the cake produced the desired effect. Thus, it is the reader who is surprised! Nothing has really changed, though. All of Alice's moral precepts -- order, the idea and the use of logic, and precise language -- have become turned upside-down; they are now either meaningless concepts, or cruel and twisted confusions for her. In her encounter with the blue Caterpillar, for example, the destruction of her identity and her belief in ordinary language, social manners, and human superiority to animals is intensified. "Who are you?" the Caterpillar asks her. Alice replies in a negative, defensive, and tentative way: "I -- I hardly know, Sir, just at present -- at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then." The way that Alice responds to the Caterpillar is as significant as what she says. Compared to the other creatures that she has met, the Caterpillar is downright nasty. For him, all conventions of social etiquette have been cast away. Alice's attempts to display respect and politeness -- by addressing him as "Sir" -- simply produce harsh derision and scorn. And he becomes even ruder -- to the point of provocation. This is all becoming horribly frustrating! The conventions of social etiquette all seem to be working against Alice, and she has no recourse. She has no other set of standards or values. All of her training has conditioned her to simply bear impoliteness with politeness. It is not easy. The crudity of the Caterpillar's first question is emphasized by the narrator's remark that such a question was not easy for Alice to answer. In the context of the dialogue, the narrator's voice reveals a wry touch of humor. But given what Alice has just been through, the haughty question is hardly a humorous one. The question "Who are you?" can be very hostile -- especially when one is addressed by a blue Caterpillar. His cold and snide observations reduce Alice's feelings to a pathetic, suppressed anger. When he repeats his nasty question, she says in a grave, but exasperated voice: "I think you ought to tell me who you are first." In a devastating retort, the Caterpillar says: "Why?" It is obvious that such an exchange imposes upon Alice simply more insecurity and feelings of guilt. Yet those kinds of feelings cannot be sustained for long; all too quickly they become hostile and negative. It is all Alice can do to contain her anger. The strength of her repressed feelings is a bit amusing to the reader. Her deliberate, determined restraint reveals the secret of much of the story's tension. Her self-control is remarkably exaggerated because Alice is a "proper little girl." The Caterpillar's attitude has so frustrated her that Alice turns to leave him, but he pleads with her to come back, and after she reluctantly does, he says: "Keep your temper." "Is that all?" asks Alice, more angry than ever. The Caterpillar then further outrages her. He asks her how she thinks she has changed. Alice tells him that she can't remember things and that her size is always changing. Earlier, when she attempted to recite the very Victorian, very moralistic poem "How Doth the Little Busy Bee," for instance, "it all came different." In a deceptively simple form of mistranslation, Alice made a dutiful creature become a slothful creature . The poem she mangles here is very much akin to what happened in Chapter II, for in that poem she kept saying: "How doth the little crocodile" -- an animal who grins and eats little fish that swim into his mouth. Carroll's parody of "proper" Victorian, didactic children's verses continues with the Caterpillar commanding her to recite "You Are Old, Father William." But the Father William poem comes out just as immoral and just as altered as the crocodile/bee poem. Each subject becomes the antithesis of the correct "moral" of the "correct verse." The Caterpillar tells Alice that her recitation is wrong because it is totally against the intent of "the true originals." Of course, it is -- and that's what frustrates Alice so. Instead of being an old man of moderate pleasures, Father William is a lusty, scheming hedonist: He advises his son that the secret of longevity and health is an active, self-indulgent life -- the very opposite of conventional wisdom on how to reach a ripe old, proper Victorian age. At the conclusion of Alice's verse recital, the two mutually antagonistic temperaments move to a final clash. We almost see Alice gnashing her teeth in frustration as she tells the Caterpillar that she wishes she were larger than just three inches tall. Naturally, the Caterpillar is offended by the implication that there is something wrong with being three inches tall -- since that is exactly his height when he is extended on his tail. Thus, he explodes in anger and becomes viciously insulting. Then he abruptly crawls away in a huff. Once more, we are reminded of the unceasing antipathy between Alice and the creatures of Wonderland. Oddly enough, in spite of the blue Caterpillar's anger, before he leaves Alice, he gives her the secret of realizing her wish. As he exits, he remarks: "One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter." Perplexed, Alice asks herself: "One side of what?" The clairvoyant Caterpillar says: "Of the mushroom" -- just as if she had asked the question aloud. Note that neither Alice nor the Caterpillar acts as though this act of mind-reading is anything extraordinary. Each of them seems to accept mind-reading as a matter of course. Alice has obviously been so thoroughly exasperated by the bizarre shrinkages and physical distortions inflicted upon her throughout the day that the Caterpillar's mental feat no longer impresses her. If she can converse at all with a Caterpillar, his mind-reading can't be much more extraordinary. But, remember, the creatures of Wonderland never behave as though they are abnormal. The mushroom has predictable effects. This time, it leaves Alice with a curving, serpentine neck. There is a curious irony at play here: The Caterpillar again provides Alice with the means of changing her size rather than simply, psychologically, "growing up." Caterpillars, of course, emerge from a chrysalis as newborn butterflies or moths; they die, so to speak, to be reborn. Alice, however, never experiences a similar metamorphosis. In fact, she resents any notion that she is anyone other than who she has always been. A good case here can be made that part of her objection to "growing up" is based on her fear of losing her identity. So long as she remains young Alice, she is innocent of good and evil. But with her neck suddenly slithering through the tree branches, she appears to be the embodiment of evil. In fact, a pigeon-hen immediately thinks that Alice is an egg-eating snake. Thus, the Pigeon's attack on Alice changes Wonderland from a pastoral garden to a primal jungle of violence and death. Alice denies that she is a serpent. "I -- I'm a little girl," she says, remembering the number of changes she has gone through during the day. "A likely story indeed!" smirks the Pigeon. Alice is again unable to triumph at the cost of an "adult." On the contrary, she feels compelled to assume a role as it is defined for her by others, and the Pigeon, once more, reinforces Alice's problem of identity. Like her series of size changes, Alice's entire existence is one gigantic question mark. Her problem is that she truly sympathizes with the Pigeon's desire to protect the nest. Nevertheless, Alice fears that she won't be able to prove that she is, truly, just a little girl with an extremely long neck. And the Pigeon rejects Alice's claim -- especially after she admits that Yes, she has eaten eggs. But her protests that she has no designs on these particular eggs come to nothing, and the Pigeon vehemently orders her away from the nest. In a state of rejection, Alice desperately tries to reduce herself back to her previous size. She still has some of the Caterpillar's mushroom, so she nibbles at pieces of it, and by a process of trial and error, she begins to be able to control her size. Thus, her success in using the mushroom to obtain the desired height shows how well she is beginning to apply the logic of size reversibility.

