Martin Gardner, 'The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition', 1983:
“...The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this:
that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense
tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only
a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a
moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex
patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity. We all live slapstick
lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death, and when we try to find out
what the Castle authorities want us to do, we are shifted from one bumbling
bureaucrat to another. We are not even sure that Count West-West, the owner of
the Castle, really exists. More than one critic has commented on the
similarities between Kafka’s Trial and the trial of the Jack of Hearts; between
Kafka’s Castle and a chess game in which living pieces are ignorant of the
game’s plan and cannot tell if they move of their own wills or are being pushed
by invisible fingers.
This vision of the monstrous mindlessness of the cosmos
(“Off with its head!”) can be grim and disturbing, as it is in Kafka and the
Book of Job, or lighthearted comedy, as in Alice or Chesterton’s The Man Who
Was Thursday...”
Artist: B E Kaplan, The New Yorker, January 2018