Reading Response to "Alice" - Kelli Horvath

*Alice experiences the loss of childhood innocence*
-archetype-
This idea is expressed in the very first chapters when Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she sees things on shelves and objects flying all around her; she grabs at them as any normal seven year old would do. However, she is initially introduced to the idea of growing up (even though she may have not known it) when she drinks the drink and becomes extremely large, she feels that once a child grows up, the opportunities only a child experiences are gone. The reality of the situation can also be described as Alice losing her sense of childhood purity or innocence, because not only her size grows, but her thought process changes as she experiences all of her own bodily changes; she never fits in with her size, (small or large). An example of this is when she is told by the white rabbit to go to his house and she again becomes a giant and no longer fits in what then appeared to be a dollhouse, this carries over to her sense of being a child transforming into a grown up. The fact that she continues to eat and drink things that make her body change are an exapmle of an archetype, or signal to the reader that there is a deeper meaning; it also signals to the audience that Alice is still a child in that she is very naive to the process of losing childhood innocence. However, this changes with the initiation of growing older.