Alice in Wonderland

John Locke, a man who existed among the time of enlightenment thinkers, influenced many through his Essay Concerning Human Understanding by noting the limitation of human’s general knowledge. Lewis Carroll’s fiction novel Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland published almost 200 years after Locke’s essay ironically conveys a similar theme of the unknown in life through Alice’s troubles in understanding Wonderland. While Carroll may be a logician, his literary work involving Alice gives a good reason to believe he would ironically agree with Locke’s philosophy. Locke believed acquiring knowledge based itself off an individuals particular state of mind. In other words, he notes that men often suffer in their pursuit of knowledge because they fail to determine the limits of how much they can understand. Life proves to contain spontaneous events that could never be predicted, and to better understand those events he claims one must accept there will never be an explanation. The limitation on knowledge highlights itself as a major theme within Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland as Alice does not even know whether she is awake or merely dreaming. Alice encounters a series of puzzles that seem to have no clear solutions, which represents the way that life affects expectations. Through her experience attempting to solve the Mad Hatter’s riddle involving the raven, and understanding the Queen’s 2 ridiculous croquet game, she had no success. As Locke stated there sometimes will never be an answer, which turns out to be true with every riddles and challenges presented to by Carroll. Alice learns that she cannot expect to find logic or meaning in the situations that she encounters in Wonderland. Therefore, Locke’s theory that one will succeed after accepting the fact of the unknown proves true as Alice begins to find herself when she comes to this realization at the end of the novel. When problems may seem solvable, interpretation must be ignored according to both