And yet, as Ian Hacking points out, the problems of one century become the solutions of the next. The dangers of possibility and chaos in the nineteenth century become the immutable laws of chance and uncertainty in the twentieth. Determinism erodes throughout both books: The world becomes a place not where things happened but where fantastic things might have happened. But then, of course, looking at it from the nineteenth-century perspective of Alice’s looking glass, they might not have happened at all. Alice is unsure if it even was her dream.

The final chapter of Alice, “Alice’s Evidence,” ends with the Queen’s coercive command for “Sentence first—verdict afterwards” followed with Alice’s reply: “Stuff and nonsense!” (p. 140). The line between “stuff” and “nonsense” is not so clear, although Alice tries to make the distinction. Precisely at this moment the nonsense, after reaching an insufferable level, ends, and Alice awakens with her head in her sister’s lap. She tells her sister her dream, whereupon her sister dreams Alice’s dream. But this second dream is different from Alice’s, for it is a dream in which the dreamer is half awake and acknowledges that the dream cannot last forever and will “change to dull reality” (p. 143). Alice, her sister surmises, will wake and grow up into everyday reality, within which the dull and boring world no longer seems opposed to desires but must be reconciled to them. Earlier the extinct Dodo had solemnly called for “more energetic remedies” (p. 35), but clearly the time for such remedies has passed. Alice’s sister entertains one last image of Alice, another invention but more tempered than earlier ones: “Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood” (p. 144).

It is a mistake to read these books, as many critics have, as lessons in growing up or in mastering or coercing experience (particularly boredom), through play or other means. If anything, the books suggest what the reasonable Alice, at the end of the book, still doesn’t know. It is, after all, not Alice but her sister who sees in Alice’s waking a probable future that Alice has herself yet to experience. Mastery turns out to be a communal rather than solitary affair. Alice’s sister has a reminiscence of Alice the child before Alice has taken leave of childhood. Thus do inexorable probabilities creep in and replace the highly improbable creatures of Alice’s dream. The reader knows that Alice’s sister is probably right: Boredom and dull reality will return when Alice wakens and then grows into an adult. And yet a memory that is not yet a memory is a highly improbable event. What control over the things we remember will we ultimately have? What for Alice has been lost but not yet lost? Of course, we often seem to know something is lost before we lose it—and this feeling suffuses childhood and the adult’s recollection of what that childhood was, which is probably the only childhood he or she can have. Such is the nature of desire: One desires things that have yet to be and that are in some sense already lost to the moment of desire. When the Queen pricks her finger, Alice asks why she doesn’t scream. The Queen replies, “Why, I’ve done all the screaming already” (p. 206).

In a paradoxical way, the book suggests that one has desires in order to forget them and thus grow into the future rather than merely repeat one’s past. In the moments before Alice wakes, both books delineate unsatisfying and indeterminate chaos: In Through the Looking-Glass, the guests are being devoured by their foods; in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Queen orders Alice’s execution and a pack of cards flies upon poor Alice, who finally exclaims, reasoning backward as it were into a realm of diminishing possibilities: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (p. 140).