… the novel merges but never collapses physical spaces, fantasy worlds, and simulated environments. The novel is composed of vivid scenes, mediated by extreme transformations. The spaces between scenes are marked by gaps and abstractions, by the loss of any sense of reality or reference. The effect is of radically discrete “spaces” (as on the chess board which Carroll claims for the underlying algorithm of the novel). The experience of reading the book is not one of rapid jumps but hazy and weird fading in and out.

Through the Looking Glass narrates a space that is unstable and shifting. In turn, the novel is framed by the question of whether Alice dreamed the whole thing, or whether the Red King is in fact dreaming it all, including Alice. There’s an undeniable relation between this framework and the narration: the events are in some way the outcome of Alice’s interpretive process, a process that is always conjectural and hypothetical. Certainly there’s a rigid “superstructure” of chess, but the role of this structure is not always clear: while chapters largely follow chess moves, there is considerable narrative development that does not fit a chess game. In what way is the narrative an outcome of the chess game?