Who Are You?
November 25, 2009This question can be answered in many different ways.
There is no right and wrong answer to this question but there is different degrees of how detailed the answer is. For example “I am Edward” tells your audience nothing besides the name your guardian gave you but it does technically answer the question. “I am Edward, I enjoy soccer, movies, and…” allows my audience to know my name and the hobbies I enjoy doing.
In chapter 2 Alice tries to identify herself. The way she does is very interesting. She thinks over all the children her age that she knew to see if she could have been changed for any of them. By the process of elimination Alice is able to identify herself.
Though Alice was able to identify her name what else can she remember about herself? This scene was really weird to me because she had so much trouble figuring out who she was.
Is Carroll trying to get at something? I tried looking at this scene from many different angles but I seem to keep on ending on road block.
What is the point of this scene? Is Carroll trying to make the reader identify him/herself? If so who are you? How would you answer this question? How would you start off answering the question?
The "Liddell" Things 
“Who am I?” Is a question that even adults struggle with. Even if we know the answer today, it may change tomorrow!
One of my very favorite Carroll quotes comes from this scene, Edward: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”
This is one of the most challenging questions we could ask ourselves – I think that what Carroll is getting at is that we are all so much more than the sum of our parts. It is not a simple equation–blonde hair + a cat named Dinah = Alice. Instead, it’s all the subtle things that make us who we are. It’s the way we thing…the way we experience the world…our curiosity as we travel down the “rabbit hole.”
The challenge is to know ourselves well enough to be certain of the answer to your title question!