Alice in Wonderland Ending Explained: The Dream Has a Second Dreamer
Everyone remembers that it was all a dream. Almost nobody remembers that once Alice wakes, Carroll hands the dream to someone else and lets her keep the last page.
Spoilers for the whole of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, including the last page and what happens after Alice wakes up.
Most people remember that it was all a dream. Fewer remember that the book does not stop when Alice wakes up. It stays behind on the bank for five more paragraphs with someone else, and that person is the one who gets the last word. The courtroom scene that sets it off is the final doorway in the playable Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where you are the one standing in the witness box when the Queen loses patience.
⚖️ What happens in the last trial?
In the novel’s twelfth and last chapter, the Knave of Hearts is tried for stealing the tarts, and the trial runs on nonsense rules. The King reads out Rule Forty-two, that all persons more than a mile high must leave the court, and Alice, who keeps growing, tells him he invented it just now. The Queen then has her own idea about the order of a trial, and Alice refuses to go along with it.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.” “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly.
The Queen orders her beheaded and nobody moves. Who everyone in that courtroom is gets sorted out in the Alice characters guide, and the trial as a portrait of every rigged hearing is argued in the adult reread.
🍂 How does Alice wake up?
She stops being afraid of the court, and the court falls apart. By now she has grown to her full size, so the threat has nothing behind it, and the line she shouts back at the Queen is the one that ends the dream.
“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
The whole pack rises into the air and comes down on her. She screams, half in fright and half in anger, tries to beat them off, and finds she is lying on the bank. Her sister is gently brushing away some dead leaves that have fallen on her face. Carroll turns the falling cards into those leaves without a break in the sentence, so the reader wakes at the same moment she does.
💭 Was it all a dream?
Yes, and the book says so in plain words. Alice tells her sister that she has had a curious dream and recounts the adventures. Her sister kisses her and gives the dream exactly one line of attention before tea.
Alice runs off, thinking what a wonderful dream it had been, and leaves the book. For the five paragraphs that are left, she exists only in her sister’s thoughts, and the sister is the one who gets to finish the story.
🌅 What is the sister’s dream?
She sits on alone, watching the sunset, and begins to dream after a fashion. First she sees little Alice herself, hands clasped on her knee. Then the place around her fills with the creatures: the White Rabbit hurrying through the long grass, the tea party rattling its cups, the Queen sending guests off to be executed.
She keeps her eyes shut, and the dream is honest about what it is made of. She knows that if she opened them every sound would turn back into the farm around her. The teacups would become sheep-bells, the Queen’s shrill cries the voice of the shepherd boy, and the Mock Turtle’s sobs the lowing of the cattle in the distance.
👧 What does the last paragraph say?
It imagines Alice as an adult, seen through her sister’s eyes, and the closing sentence runs on for the whole paragraph before it reaches the word Wonderland.
and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago
The story ends on the person who heard it, deciding it is worth telling again, and the whole closing passage is in the free Project Gutenberg text. How the films handle the waking is one of the questions in the book-versus-film ranking. The sequel ends on a far less settled dream, covered in the Looking-Glass ending explained.
Sources
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Project Gutenberg text) — Project Gutenberg
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Wikipedia
- Alice Liddell — Wikipedia
- Arthur Rackham's 1907 illustration of the flying pack of cards — Wikimedia Commons
Frequently asked questions
- Was Alice dreaming or was it real?
- Dreaming, and the book sets that frame up in its opening scene. Chapter I opens with Alice bored on the same bank beside her sister, who is reading a book without pictures or conversations, and feeling sleepy in the heat. The White Rabbit runs past a few lines later. The ending returns her to that exact spot.
- To you, what's the message of Alice in Wonderland?
- The last sentence offers one, and it is gentler than the book around it. The sister pictures Alice grown up and able to feel with children's simple sorrows and "find a pleasure in all their simple joys", remembering her own child-life and the happy summer days. The nonsense is followed by a wish about memory.
- What is the deeper meaning of the book "Alice in Wonderland"?
- Readers find many, but the ending points to where the book came from. Carroll first told the story on 4 July 1862, on a rowing trip with the three Liddell sisters, and the closing pages picture something close to it: a grown-up Alice passing a strange tale to children who may one day pass it on again.
- Who wakes Alice up at the end?
- Her older sister, who is never named in the book. Her first words are "Wake up, Alice dear!" followed by a teasing remark about what a long sleep you've had, as if Alice has merely dozed off in the afternoon. The final paragraph calls Alice "this same little sister of hers", which settles who is older.
- What does Alice's sister dream about?
- The same adventures, pieced together from what she has just been told. Her version includes the pig-baby sneezing on the Duchess's knee, the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeak of the Lizard's slate-pencil and the choking of the suppressed guinea-pigs, details she can only know because Alice has just recounted them.
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