“Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!”
Why does the White Rabbit exclaim “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” and what does this urgency set in motion for Alice and the story’s themes?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- White Rabbit
- Chapter
- CHAPTER I. Down the Rabbit-Hole
Analysis
On a hot afternoon beside the river, Alice sits bored while her sister reads a book “without pictures or conversations.” As Alice weighs the trivial effort of making a daisy-chain, a White Rabbit with pink eyes runs past, muttering, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” The oddity barely registers—until the Rabbit takes a watch from its waistcoat-pocket and hurries on. That concrete detail—watch and waistcoat—shocks Alice into action; “burning with curiosity,” she follows, reaching the rabbit-hole under the hedge and plunging down the long fall that opens Wonderland. The exclamation thus lands just before the first boundary-crossing: it is the audible spark that converts languid speculation into pursuit, and ordinary countryside into the threshold of the fantastic.
What the Rabbit’s worry means
From punctuality to paradox: foreshadowing Time’s rule and ruin
The line compresses several devices at once. Anthropomorphism gives a rabbit a gentleman’s worry; the waistcoat and watch extend that social role. Repetition and exclamation marks dramatize panic, while irony surfaces in Alice’s delayed recognition that the event is strange. Textually, the urgency catalyzes pursuit—Alice “started to her feet” and follows—so the plot’s fall depends on a punctuality crisis. Thematically, it prefigures Wonderland’s contradictory regimes of time: the Rabbit’s haste, the Hatter’s arrested clock, and the Queen’s impatient commands later in the croquet-ground and courtroom. The same obsession that makes the Rabbit late will trap others in ritual without progress. By echoing schoolroom habits (Alice rehearses facts about miles and “Latitude or Longitude”), the moment also links time-keeping to pedagogy: rote knowledge accompanies motion without understanding. Thus the cry not only launches the journey; it frames the book’s satirical inquiry into schedules, rules, and the difference between activity and meaning.
Without the Rabbit’s anxious outcry and visible watch, Alice would likely remain on the bank; the line is the immediate cause of her pursuit and the narrative’s first decisive action.
The panic about lateness introduces Time as an oppressive presence. Later, Time’s refusal to move at the tea-party literalizes that pressure into endless ritual, completing the joke the line begins.
Themes and characters in play
The White Rabbit embodies rules-games-and-social-performance: he dresses, keeps a schedule, and fears consequences for tardiness. His worry entangles Alice—whose curiosity and growing critical sense define identity-and-growing-up—in a chase that structures much of Chapter I. The cry also anticipates time-ritual-and-stasis: the Hatter and March Hare will live at six o’clock, a comic endpoint of the Rabbit’s anxious punctuality. Linguistically, the simple, repeated exclamation points to logic-language-and-nonsense, where ordinary phrases gain absurd force when spoken by the wrong speaker. Together, the line connects Alice to figures (the Rabbit, later the Hatter/Hare) who translate social etiquette into both movement (the chase) and paralysis (perpetual tea).