The Myths/Folklore Blog

Once there was a young boy, Mark who lived in a normal suburban neighborhood in Oklahoma. Mark didn’t have many friends, he was a bit too odd. That didn’t bother Mark at all, he filled his time with adventure books and exploring the nearby fields that surrounded his town. One day, as Mark was exploring, he came across a manhole cover. Normally Mark wouldn’t have taken notice but there were a couple of things that drew in his attention. One, instead of having a rusted color (like most manholes Mark has seen) it was chrome! Two, when Mark drew closer to it, he could hear a pleasant humming noise coming from underneath it. So, naturally, Mark went to the manhole and tried to lift it. The cover flew off, it was as Mark had the strength of 10 men! He thought to himself, “Aren’t manhole covers supposed to be really heavy?” However, before he could give thought as to why this manhole cover was so odd, a huge gust of wind pushed him into the hole! Mark felt the wind gushing past him ...

Again, Lewis Carroll does a great job of subverting expectations and giving us a great reason to keep reading his works! The situations that Alice finds herself in keep on getting stranger and stranger, with the story eventually culminating in her becoming a queen in Wonderland! Who could have seen that coming? The characters that she surrounds herself with are again unique and entertaining. My personal favorite is the Red Queen, with her evil-like, no-nonsense attitude. This is characterized extremely well through quotes such as, “Speak when you’re spoken to!” and “You can’t be a Queen, you know, till you’ve passed the proper examination”. This shows that she relies on what being a queen is all about, that she won’t let anyone take a queen spot who isn’t worthy, especially not someone as young and as normal as Alice. The Red Queen further humiliates Alice, making her seem less in their eyes, by asking her odd type of math problems. This is a recurring theme throughout Alice’s advent...

Lewis Carroll has such an interesting way of telling a story. Not only are the characters that he creates unique and inventive, but they stand out which such vivid detail that is it just tremendously easy to imagine them. The way he uses words is also highly distinct – whimsy cuts through the story because of the dialog between the normal Alice and the absolutely abnormal circumstances. I’ve never read the sequel of Alice in Wonderland, so this was interesting for me to read it. It was obvious right from the start that this was a sequel to such a fabulous adventure from last time. He also has a ways of putting pretty fantastic poetry within his stories, something that people struggle with JUST having a poem in the middle. An example of fine poetry (that’s funny at the same time) was the “Jabberwocky” poem, which was filled with all sorts of great wordplay and odd use of language. An example of odd wording was, “ ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves”. I’m not even sure what this ph...