Lewis Carroll's sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, often eclipses its predecessor, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in brilliance and complexity. Although the two works are intertwined through their protagonist and thematic parallels, each possesses distinct characters and settings. Through the Looking-Glass presents a more sophisticated exploration of reality and logic, making it potentially more compelling to adults than children.

Shared Elements and Distinctions

Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass share structural similarities, such as their division into twelve chapters, and blend elements of fairy tales with scientific undercurrents. The protagonist, Alice, ages from seven to seven and a half across the two narratives. A subtle shift in scenery transforms the idyllic summer outdoors of the first book into a more somber, wintry, indoor setting in the sequel. The first book's card game motif gives way to chess in Through the Looking-Glass, with the latter employing a more intricate symbolic architecture within its chess-and-mirror universe, diverging from Wonderland’s seemingly random adventure.

The Chessboard of Life

Carroll ingeniously uses chess as a metaphorical framework, a novel concept in literature at the time, though it has since inspired countless sci-fi narratives. Within this grand game, Alice is cast as a white pawn traversing a life-sized chessboard marked by brooks and hedges. Her interactions are limited to adjacent pieces, mirroring the pawn's limited perspective, and she remains within the queen’s realm until her climactic transformation into a queen herself, capturing the Red Queen and checkmating the Red King. The characters’ behaviors align with their chess piece counterparts—queens wield influence and power, while kings appear ineffectual. The White Knight's erratic movement parodies the chess knight’s peculiar L-shaped maneuver.

Chess as a Reflection of Life

Critics have identified inconsistencies in the chess game, such as the White side making nine consecutive moves and unnoticed checks. Carroll, in a note, asserted the game's correctness regarding the moves, though admitting inconsistencies in the alternations of sides. His intention was less about strategizing and more about creating a conceptual journey for a child—Alice—engaging with an adult-controlled world, inspired by tales he created for Alice Liddell, the real-life muse for his fictional hero.

This chess metaphor has been interpreted as a representation of life, with Alice embodying Everyman. Just as humans navigate life with limited comprehension of the forces at play, Alice maneuvers through her experiences without understanding the broader game. Even the queens, despite their mobility, fail to perceive the larger reality beyond the board, suggesting that personal reality becomes abstract when one’s perspective is as limited as the chess pieces'.

Reality and Perception

Carroll further explores the nature of reality when Alice learns from Tweedledum and Tweedledee that she is merely a figment of the Red King’s dream. The notion that she would disappear upon his awakening echoes philosopher George Berkeley's idea that existence is contingent on perception. Alice, like Samuel Johnson, who famously countered Berkeley by kicking a stone, insists on her reality, evidenced by her tears. The narrative concludes ambiguously with Alice pondering, "Which dreamed it?" followed by Carroll's playful reflection in his final poem on life itself being a dream.

Mirror Reflections and Antimatter

The book’s second structural device revolves around the theme of mirror reversal, intricately linked to chess through the initial asymmetric positioning of pieces as mirror images. Carroll's left-right reversals—exemplified by the Tweedle brothers, Alice's backward journey towards the Red Queen, and the paradox of running to stay in place—transcend simple mind games. Since the book's publication, the scientific proposal of antimatter as a mirror image of matter echoes Carroll’s playful queries about...