“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
What does Alice mean by asking the use of a book “without pictures or conversations,” and how does it frame the story that follows?
Quick Facts
- Speaker
- Alice
- Chapter
- CHAPTER I. Down the Rabbit-Hole
Analysis
On a hot afternoon, Alice sits beside her sister, who is reading a text-only book. Bored and drowsy, Alice peeks at the pages and finds no pictures or dialogue. She wonders what good such a book can be, given her desire for visual interest and talk. Weighing whether making a daisy-chain is worth the effort, she is roused by the sudden appearance of a White Rabbit fretting about being late. The line about books occurs just before Wonderland intrudes, marking the last calm moment on the riverbank and revealing Alice’s impatience with silent, purely verbal instruction. Her preference for images and conversation contrasts with her sister’s quiet, decorous reading and sets up Alice’s chase into a world that will supply exactly what she craves: lively exchanges and striking, labeled objects.
Meaning and interpretation
From didactic silence to dialogic experiment
Placed against the sister’s silent reading, Alice’s line establishes a critique of pedagogy that prizes passive absorption over inquiry. Chapter I immediately substantiates this shift. Labels become prompts to test (the “DRINK ME” bottle without “poison”), and space becomes a problem to solve (the little door, the unreachable key). Dialogue becomes methodology: Alice thinks aloud, questions vocabulary (“Latitude or Longitude”), and rehearses schoolroom facts even as the scene exposes their irrelevance to falling down an impossibly long well. The narrative form mirrors her preference: free indirect discourse collapses narrator and child’s voice, making the book itself a conversation with Alice’s mind. The complaint thus foreshadows the work’s pedagogy by play—trial, error, and talking through problems—rather than rules. It also anticipates later chapters where lively talk overtakes meaning (Hatter’s riddles), but in Chapter I the emphasis is constructive: talk enables exploration, and images and labels guide action, offering a counter-model to text-only instruction.
The thought appears through free indirect discourse, letting Alice’s criteria for “useful” books govern the storytelling. From the labeled bottle to her self-conversations, Chapter I aligns form with her desire for visual cues and talk-driven discovery.
“Pictures or conversations” anticipates a world of signs and speech acts: labels prompt trials, sizes must be read and adjusted, and talking becomes a tool (and sometimes a trap) for navigating the hall of doors.
Theme and character links
- Education-and-mock-pedagogy: Challenges silent, moralizing texts; promotes inquiry via labels and dialogue. - Logic-language-and-nonsense: Prefers speech and signs that later stretch logic. - Dream-framing-and-memory: Opposes the sister’s quiet realism with a dream that converses back. Characters: Alice’s curiosity drives the chase; the sister models the text-only book; the White Rabbit catalyzes the move from boredom to interactive reading.