How are you getting on?
Cheshire Cat·CHAPTER VIII. The Queen’s Croquet-Ground
Central Question

What does the Cheshire Cat mean by asking “How are you getting on?” during the Queen’s chaotic croquet game, and what does it reveal about Alice’s situation?

Quick Facts

Speaker
Cheshire Cat
Chapter
CHAPTER VIII. The Queen’s Croquet-Ground

Analysis

Context

Alice is pressed into the Queen of Hearts’ croquet match, where flamingoes serve as mallets, hedgehogs as balls, and soldiers as moving arches. Players ignore turns, quarrel constantly, and the Queen punctuates each minute with “Off with his head!” As Alice struggles to control her living mallet and find a stable arch, a grin materializes in the air and develops into the Cheshire Cat’s head. Only when there is “mouth enough” does it speak. In this din of disorder, the Cat asks, “How are you getting on?”—a deliberately plain question amid absurdity. Alice, relieved to have a listener, sets down her flamingo and describes the game’s unfairness: there seem to be no rules, the pieces move themselves, and no one waits their turn.

What the Cat’s question invites

On the surface, “How are you getting on?” is a polite check-in. In context, it functions as a prompt for self-assessment: Are you progressing under conditions where progress is nearly impossible? The Cat’s minimal, nonjudgmental inquiry contrasts with the surrounding noise—royal commands, quarrels, and threats—creating a pocket of reason where Alice can articulate her experience. Her immediate response—cataloging moving arches, disobedient flamingoes, and turnless play—transforms complaint into analysis. The Cat’s partial body underscores this dynamic: a mouth appears first, as if Wonderland momentarily offers speech without embodied authority. That arrangement lets Alice speak frankly without fear of immediate reprisal. The question thus widens from gameplay to Alice’s broader navigation of Wonderland. Throughout the book she experiments with scale, language, and manners; here she evaluates a social game whose rules masquerade as etiquette but collapse under scrutiny. The Cat’s cue encourages Alice to judge conditions rather than herself, rehearsing the critical stance she will take in the courtroom when she rejects “sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
Analysis

Understatement, authority, and the logic of nonsense

The Cat’s understated question is ironic in a setting engineered to defeat ordinary play. By inviting a status report, it exposes the mismatch between the notion of a “game” and a field where rules are either unspoken or unenforced. Alice’s inventory—no turns, animate equipment, wandering arches—demonstrates Wonderland’s inversion of procedure. This exchange also initiates a chain that targets authority: immediately afterward, the Cat asks Alice about the Queen, leading to the near-miss of being overheard; soon the King demands the Cat be removed, and a pseudo-legal quarrel erupts over beheading a head without a body. The Cat’s innocuous opener thus foreshadows the logical impasse to come, where definitions (What counts as a body? What counts as a rule?) collide with power’s impatience. For Alice, answering this question marks growth: she moves from coping to critiquing, a shift from bewildered participant to analyst of Wonderland’s social performance.

A simple question as a critical lens

Because the Cat asks for progress, Alice evaluates conditions, not her own competence. Her reply itemizes failures of rules and equipment, converting frustration into clear critique of how Wonderland’s “games” disguise coercion as play.

Mouth first: speech without authority

The Cat appears as a grin and then a speaking mouth before the rest of the head. This comic synecdoche foregrounds language itself, creating a safe rhetorical space where Alice can speak freely amid the Queen’s threats.

Themes and characters in play

The moment links rules-games-and-social-performance (a “game” without workable rules), logic-language-and-nonsense (a head that can speak without a body; later, the beheading paradox), and arbitrary-authority-and-justice (the Queen’s instant sentences, the King’s empty procedure). It also tracks identity-and-growing-up: Alice’s candid, structured complaint shows her developing judgment. The Cheshire Cat remains Wonderland’s liminal commentator—present enough to converse, insubstantial enough to evade punishment—encouraging Alice’s skepticism that will culminate in the trial scene.

Related

Characters

Cheshire Cat