Customer Reviews

Alice in Wonderland (Cliffs Notes)

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Senna's 'Cliffs Notes' on Alice in Wonderland provides and excellent background and summary - both of the author's life, and the book itself. Senna points out that "Alice in Wonderland" is whimsical nonsense literature that contradicts the more typical strict, moralistic children's literature of the Victorian Age. Odder yet, it was written by an ultra-conservative man, Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. Charles Dodgson was the son of a pious and gloomy parson, stammered, and was a bit of a loner that was fascinated with puzzles and anagrams. Dodgson's real-life professions included librarian, mathematics lecturer, deacon, and dorm master.

'Alice' is told in the form of a dream by Alice, the lead character. Throughout, she never progresses to any rational understanding, mental, or psychological growth. Her dream sometimes has the aspects of a nightmare. 'Wonderland' is a world where fairy or elf-like creatures meet and talk with one-another, and all the animals (except the pig, who had been transformed from a baby) have the nagging, whining, and complaining attitudes of adults. Carroll satirizes the pseudo-intellectuality of Victorian adults, and none of this nonsense ever makes sense to Alice.

The story begins with Alice and her sister sitting on the bank of a river reading a book without pictures or dialogue. Becoming bored, Alice follows a white rabbit, walking upright, wearing a waistcoat, speaking English, and worried over the time on his pocket watch. Alice falls down a deep rabbit hole. There she is repeatedly confronted by alternatively growing and shrinking in size. Alice triumphs in the end by outgrowing nonsense - scattering the absurd playing cards, waking from her dream, and realizing that reason can oppose nonsense and win. The non-stop movie of horrors then ends.

Been such a long time since I even thought of Cliff notes -- but came in so very useful. Now I figure I can read the original with some ideas of what's going on... Book was in excellent condition as described; no marks to distract my reading.

It started out as a normal day for Alice, until she saw a rabbit with a watch cross her path saying " Im late Im late". She decided to follow the rabbit through a whole in a tree. She fell for what seemed to be hours until she landed in a house. There she saw some beans on the table in which she ate and then she kept growing and growing. Well to make a long story short Alice made many friends and enemys in Wonderland and she had to leave them all after finding the key to take her back home

This book is great if you have an imagination.