The wonderland of self …

… The Story of Alice review – the worrying, winding road to Wonderland | Books | The Guardian.

“Who in the world am I?” is Alice’s refrain. It’s a question she answers when she meets the caterpillar on his mushroom. “I can’t explain myself,” she says, “because I’m not myself, you see.” The psychological grip in which Carroll holds his reader is all to do with a search for identity in which, teasing, he supplies more questions than answers. Possibly that reflects Dodgson’s unresolved dialogue with his own childhood. These dream-books are hypnotically nostalgic. Virginia Woolf identified this when she observed that “these are not books for children. They are the only books in which we become children”.