In this short, introductory
chapter we are introduced to Alice, a young girl, who is sitting on the bank of a river with her older
sister. Alice is bored and a bit sleepy, but she is startled awake by a talking White Rabbit who hops
by with a pocket watch.
Alice
follows the rabbit down his rabbit hole, but loses him almost immediately. The hole is quite deep and
Alice falls for a relatively long time. During the fall she notices that the hole is lined with cupboards
filled with things. She also talks to herself as she falls. Upon reaching the bottom of the rabbit hole
Alice catches up with the rabbit just long enough to see him scurry off, complaining about how late
he is.
Upon turning a corner
after the rabbit, Alice finds herself alone in a room of locked doors. On a glass table in the middle
of the room she found a very small key which did not fit any of the doors. After some searching she
discovers a very small door behind a curtain. She opens that door with the key and sees that the door
leads out into a beautiful garden she wishes she could get to. However, the doorway is too small, preventing
Alice from passing out into the garden. This problem is resolved when Alice turns back to the table
and finds a vial of liquid on it that says "DRINK ME." The potion shrinks Alice to ten inches in height
and she heads to the door only to find that it is still locked, and the key remains on the glass table
now out of reach. Disappointed, Alice almost cries, but then she scolds herself as an adult might, and
in effect, pulls herself together. It is at this point that Alice finds a piece of cake in a box marked
"EAT ME" on the floor. Concluding that the cake will probably make her grow big, Alice eats the whole
thing.
The most important
thing introduced in this chapter is Alice's fluctuating sense of self. Alice, meant to be a girl of
about eleven or so, is on the cusp of adolescence. But what does she want to be? If she shrinks to a
child-like size to get through the doorway into what seems to be the garden of childhood, then she is
too small to reach the key to open that door. She is trapped in a kind of paradox. Throughout the chapter
Alice is "trying on" her adult self. She speaks in a learned manner, even when she isn't quite sure
what she is speaking about, and she often creates in her own mind an adult personality to check her
childish impulses.
This split
personality of Alice's will become the core problem of the book. Is it more important to enjoy the nonsense
of childhood unaware, or should order be imposed on one's life at the expense of some of that joy?
Ultimately, in the very opening
of the book, Alice is already asking herself: "Do I want to grow up, or do I want to stay small?"
