Running in Circles

The chapter starts off when they get out of Alice’s pool of tears that she cried in chapter two. As the group of animals sit around they try to figure an effective way to get dry. The mouse proposes to tell the story of William the conquer. They all listen to the mouse. Once the story is completed everyone still found themselves wet. Thus the Dodo suggests having a Caucus race. All the animals agree to have the race and so they race. Though this race is not similar to a 200 meter dash. Instead all the animals run around. The animals kept running around aimlessly until The Dodo declared the race to be over. But the participants believe every race should have a winner so therefore they declare all the participants are winners. Once they reached this point they believed all the winners should receive prizes. The animals choose Alice to give out prizes. Alice searches her pockets for something she can give away as a prize. She finds candy and gives all of it to all the animals and leaves nothing for herself. But the other animals believe she should get something so therefore she gives the dodo a thumbtack and the dodo returns it to Alice as her gift. Alice finds this action weird. After the animals eat there snack the mouse suggests telling another tale. Alice and the mouse have a debate over the puzzlement of tale and tail. The mouse becomes mad at Alice and leaves. Once the mouse is gone Alice talks about her cat Dinah. She talks about her hunting habit this forces the crowd of animals to be scared and flee.

This whole chapter describes how the animals are not effective with their action. It makes no sense that a story would make them dry. Then they have the race. The race was a step up from telling a story to get them dry but still not even close to being one of the most effective ways to make the animals dry the fastest. The race itself is very chaotic. There is no set goal and all the animals run around as if their heads are cut off. I agree with Alice’s feelings toward receiving her prize. The action was simply pointless in my opinion. I believe the debate over tale and tail was also unnecessary. Basically the whole chapter is showing how ineffective and pointless the animals are. But the real question here is what do these animals represent? My beliefs are that they represent the English government during Carroll’s time. I think that Carroll believed that his government was being very ill managed and was very ineffective. If my theory is correct then it supports my other theory that states that Carroll was very attached to the politics of his time. I got to this conclusion because he found this topic to be important enough to mention in a book designed to be told to a little girl. This whole chapter describes the politicians running in circles instead of toward a useful objective.

What are you beliefs of what the animals in this chapter represented? Do you support my theory of the animals representing the English government of Carroll’s time or do you have a different theory?