The title of Alice in Wonderland. I'm Swedish, so when I was a kid, before I knew English, I knew it as Alice i Underlandet, which means the exact same thing. However, the Swedish word "under" means both "wonder" and "below", and I always assumed that they meant "Alice in the Land Below", which made sense to me, since she went down the rabbit hole. It wasn't until I started school and learned English that I realised what they really meant.
The original title, by the way, was "Alice's Adventures Underground".
The White Knight's clumsiness makes sense when you consider the fact that he's a chess knight, and therefore literally incapable of walking in a straight line.
The opening line of "the Walrus and the Carpenter." It talks about how brightly the sun was shining, and how "this was odd, because it was the middle of the night." Some might dismiss this as Carroll just being silly as usual. But one of the protagonists of this poem is a walrus. Where do walruses live? Way up north, near the North Pole, where the sun often does shine late into the "night." Parts of northern Europe are even called "the land of the midnight sun."note But then also the walrus talks about "why the sea is boiling hot", which doesn't fit with the North Pole idea, so maybe it is just Carroll being silly as usual
It's also hard to blame the Walrus for eating more oysters than the Carpenter, since a walrus probably needs to eat a little more than a human.
Plus oysters are part of a walrus's natural diet.
The entrance her second time around being a looking-glass. Her adventure in the second book, and quest to become a "queen," makes it a journey of self-reflection! No small wonder a dream about wanting to grow up would begin with Alice looking in a mirror.
The Cheshire Cat tells Alice that she must be mad, or she wouldn't have come to Wonderland. Alice's inner monologues also reveal that while she's the Only Sane Man in Wonderland, she's actually quite a bit of a Cloud Cuckoolander. When we remember that Wonderland is All Just a Dream, it all makes perfect sense: all the madness of Wonderland is a manifestation of Alice's own strangeness, because it's all the creation of her own mind.
For the ballet: The twist ending, where Alice turns out to be a young 21st century woman dreaming she was Alice Liddell, not only explains the ballet's departures from the book, but is the only way that Alice and Jack's love story could have had a happy ending. If she really had been Alice Liddell and Jack really had been a gardener's boy, their romance would have been doomed, because Alice Liddell eventually married Reginald Hargreaves. But in modern times, they can live Happily Ever After.
Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice he thinks she should have stopped aging when she reached seven. She objects that one cannot prevent oneself from aging, and he replies that she could have stopped aging at seven if only she'd had "proper assistance"... Since Wonderland is All Just a Dream, and thus Humpty-Dumpty is a projection of Alice's psyche, could Alice be suppressinga darker, almost suicidal, sideto her mental state?
When Alice is falling down the rabbit hole, possibly to her death (and showing no concern for this), the only one she mentions possibly missing her is her cat, Dinah. Does Alice merely have a special fondness for her cat, or does she think no one else will miss her if she dies? It's worth noting that what very little we get about Alice's family life (she has a sister, a brother, a nurse, and a governess) is mentioned by the narration alone, and her parents aren't ever mentioned at all.
At the very least, it doesn't seem to occur to her that she could die. She imagines that she'll fall right through the earth and come out in New Zealand or Australia. But the fact remains that Dinah is the only creature in her everyday life whom she imagines missing her, and the only one whom she worries that she might never see again. Otherwise – unlike in some of the adaptations – she shows no concern about whether or not she'll ever get home, and in the second book she explicitly doesn't want to go home. Is this just because she enjoys exploring new places and having adventures, and/or because she's dreaming? Or is she indifferent to her home because her home is indifferent to her?
