Here Alice reverses the logical argument of the earlier chapters, in which she (or something inside her) turned nothing into something. After this point, the story of Alice’s “real” life is set to unfold. This suggests that Alice is no longer trapped in someone else’s dream (of her). Like a good many children who are on the verge of not being children, Alice is learning forgetfulness, as a prelude to something (the future of one’s desires) that cannot be known with certitude. Childhood desires thus comprise a nonsense of a different order.

For Carroll, boredom still manages a moral impetus: It teaches the adult (Alice is an adult before her time) that nonsense is both possible and necessary; it also teaches the adult that nonsense is a regressive fiction that one wakes from and waking from, then mourns. For an adult, the nonsense of childhood is the nonsense of its loss. Competing necessities govern the end of each book, and they govern the strategies involved in regulating one’s desires, which also need to be forgotten so they can be retold. Only by forgetting childhood desires can a certain amount of sense be gained. But, of course, the absence of those desires has to be regulated too; perhaps boredom is a preemptive strike at desires we may never have. None of the games that Alice plays suggests mastery, a narrative thread, the end of conflict, the resolution of a misunderstanding, or a satisfying answer to the questions her desires pose. It is Alice’s sister who forgets for her, rather than Alice herself.

Of the two books, Through the Looking-Glass is the bleaker; it ends with a question, whereas Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends with a sister’s loving reminiscence, delivered in Wordsworthian fashion as a premature eulogy for a childhood not yet lost, a lost childhood whose losses were already being deferred, as it were, by a familial caretaker. One of the ways to learn to give up an unbearable personal fantasy (and Alice can barely bear hers) is to make it the subject of a story. But once that is done, a mystery ends and with it a part of desire. What story can be told to get desire back? Perhaps storytelling offers a clue to deferring desires for something that has not yet arrived. To speak is to speak, as Carroll does, of imaginary things. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is, after all, a story told by Carroll to children, and Alice in turn tells her sister her dream, another kind of story. At the close of both Alice books, the adult reader/listener again confronts Alice the child, someone on the verge of becoming someone else, someone the grown-up reader knows well, someone who is “loving and gentle . . . courteous to all, high or low . . . trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know; and lastly, curious—wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood.” 19 Understanding desires turns out to be a communal rather than a solitary experience. For Alice’s dream language to make sense, Alice must escape it first. The easiest way to escape is to make it the subject of a sharing; the language of the dream must be given to someone else.

Like Alice’s sister’s act of remembering, the reader’s recognition is a repetition with a difference, because the repetition involves retelling. Repetition is about eternity and stopping time; repetition with a difference presupposes change and time passing. Carroll tellingly pairs impossibility with curiosity—even if such impossibilities are something not entirely forgotten. The adult is a child whose childhood desires are something she hasn’t learned to forget. Such acts of forgetting, like acts of mastery, turn out to be equally contingent as the futures the child hasn’t yet had. The problems Alice confronts, for all their seeming reality, are the stuff of fantasy, but the fantasy may be merely a screen for banal fears and anxieties the adult world generates: how to put on shoes when your feet are too far off; how to get into a door that is too small; how to reach a golden key; how to get out of a pool of one’s own tears? In this sense the nonsensical obstacles of childhood, the things known as fantasies, become the more reasonable problems of adulthood, but they remain problems to be solved nonetheless.