“because I’m not myself, you see.”
What does Alice mean when she says she’s “not myself,” and how does this line frame her identity crisis with the Caterpillar?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER V. Advice from a Caterpillar
Analysis
In Chapter V, Alice meets the blue Caterpillar, who smokes a hookah and greets her with the blunt question, “Who are you?” Already unsettled by repeated size changes, Alice answers that she hardly knows who she is now, offering the line, “because I’m not myself, you see.” The Caterpillar challenges every statement—“Explain yourself,” “I don’t see,” “Why?”—refusing the emotional logic of Alice’s experience. Their exchange turns on bodily change and identity: Alice cites her fluctuating size and failed recitations as evidence of self-uncertainty, while the Caterpillar, despite being a creature destined for metamorphosis, denies that change is confusing. After a terse, circular dialogue, it finally offers practical advice: different sides of the mushroom will make her grow or shrink, initiating Alice’s deliberate experiments with scale.
Meaning of “I’m not myself”
Identity, metamorphosis, and method
The line reframes identity as provisional and experimentally tested. Immediately after saying she is “not myself,” Alice is directed to a tool—the two-sided mushroom—that allows her to manipulate size. Her subsequent nibbling sequences, alternating taller and shorter, dramatize an empirical method: hypothesize, test, adjust. The Caterpillar’s interrogation, patterned by bare imperatives (“Explain,” “Repeat”), exposes the bankruptcy of rote pedagogy: Alice’s failed recital of “How doth the little busy bee” replaced by Carroll’s parody “Father William” shows that memory no longer guarantees moral identity. Irony runs through the exchange: the Caterpillar, a larva destined to become a butterfly, denies the strangeness of change, while Alice, human and supposedly stable, experiences metamorphosis. The claim “I’m not myself” thus condenses Wonderland’s satire of fixed Victorian selves and anticipates later scenes (the courtroom) where Alice asserts judgment only after gaining control over her shifting scale.
The softening tag “you see” maintains etiquette even as Alice admits radical uncertainty. Carroll juxtaposes social poise with genuine disorientation, revealing how Victorian politeness can obscure rather than resolve identity confusion.
A metamorphic creature dismisses metamorphic anxiety. The Caterpillar’s “It isn’t” contrasts Alice’s evidence of change, sharpening the irony and pushing her toward self-reliance through experiment with the mushroom.
Links to themes and characters
This line anchors identity-and-growing-up and bodily-change-and-autonomy: Alice’s sense of self is unstable because her body and recollections won’t hold still. With the Caterpillar, the exchange satirizes education-and-mock-pedagogy (recitation vs. understanding) and invokes logic-language-and-nonsense through literal-idiomatic slippage (“not myself”). It anticipates guidance from the Cheshire Cat about direction and sanity, and prepares for the courtroom climax where Alice, now mastering her size, resists arbitrary-authority-and-justice. The scene’s move from contradiction to practical instruction foreshadows Alice’s broader shift from accepting rules to testing them.