Through the Looking-Glass Ending Explained: Alice or the Red King?

Spoilers for the whole of Through the Looking-Glass, including the last chapter and the poem that closes the book.

The sequel’s ending is a question with no answer, and the question was planted eight chapters earlier by two brothers in a wood. The game on Saylia is built on the first book rather than this one, so the playable Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends in a courtroom, where Alice wakes before anyone can ask whose dream it was.

🐈 Who dreamed it, Alice or the Red King?

The book refuses to say. The last chapter is titled as a question, Which Dreamed it?, and Alice spends it trying to get an answer out of a kitten. Her reasoning is tidy, and she puts it to the kitten in so many words.

You see, Kitty, it musthave been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!

Kitty goes on washing the other paw and pretends not to hear. Alice had already complained, earlier in the chapter, that kittens purr whatever you say to them, so you cannot tell a yes from a no. Then, in the last sentence of prose in the book, the narrator turns to the reader and asks which you think it was.

♚ Where does the Red King’s dream come from?

From Tweedledum and Tweedledee, in Chapter IV. They take Alice to see the Red King asleep and snoring under a tree, and the brothers explain what that sleep means for her.

“You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!” “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”

Alice’s answer in the wood is sharp: if she is only a thing in his dream, what does that make the twins? She cries anyway, and they mock her for crying with tears that are not real. The ending brings that scene back. By the last chapter she is awake and safe at home, and, as any summary of the novel will tell you, she still cannot rule it out.

♟️ How do the last chapters get there?

Fast, and out of all proportion. The coronation feast in Chapter IX falls apart, Alice cries that she cannot stand it any longer and pulls the tablecloth off, then turns on the Red Queen and shakes her. The queen gets smaller and rounder and softer, and Alice wakes up holding something else. The peculiar shape of those three chapters, including one that is a single line, is laid out in the essay on whether the sequel is worth reading.

👑 Who turned into what?

Alice settles two cases and leaves a third open. Kitty, the black kitten, was the Red Queen. Alice proves it by setting the kitten face to face with the red chess piece, and decides the way it looks away means guilt. The white kitten, Snowdrop, must have been the White Queen, which is why that queen was so untidy in the dream: her mother was in the middle of washing her face.

The open case is Dinah, the mother cat. Alice guesses she turned into Humpty Dumpty and tells her to keep it quiet until she is sure. The identifications matter for the big question, because Alice argues that Kitty, as the Red King’s wife, ought to know whose dream it was.

⛵ What is the poem at the end?

A short untitled poem of seven three-line stanzas, and an acrostic. Read the first letter of each line downward and they spell ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL, the full name of the girl the stories were first told to. The reference article on Alice Liddell sets out the same acrostic, letter by letter.

Ever drifting down the stream— / Lingering in the golden gleam— / Life, what is it but a dream?

So the book answers its question twice, in two different voices. The prose leaves Alice and the Red King unresolved. The poem shrugs at the whole idea of waking life and hands the story back to a real child who, by 1871, had grown up.

🃏 How is it different from the first book’s ending?

The first book settles the dream and then passes it on. Alice wakes with her head in her sister’s lap, tells the dream, runs off to tea, and the sister dreams it over again. That ending, and what the sister sees in it, is covered in the Wonderland ending explained. The sequel never settles whose dream it was, and that open question is the ending Carroll chose.