Throughout Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, he constantly reinforces the idea of identity. In Through the Looking Glass, Carroll not only discusses the idea of self-identity but also how objects are identified. In the passage, Alice experiences identity confusion not only with herself but with the objects around her.
For starters, before Alice even enters the wood, she considers what will become of her name when she loses it. In Alice’s mind, she will be given a new name- “almost certain to be an ugly one.” This could be Alice trying to see who she will be without her name as her identity. Once Alice finally enters the wood, she forgets what it’s even called. In fact, she wonders what it calls itself. This relates to the idea of the identity principle in mathematics and logic because for anyone to call the woods the woods, it had to originate from somewhere. Not only does this relate to the identity principle, but it also relates to self-identity. Because Alice personifies a tree, the shade, and the woods she questions the objects’ self-identity.
Once she forgets her name, Alice immediately panics. She questions her identity without having a name. To Alice, her name represents everything she is, thinks, feels, and believes. Without a name to identify herself, she no longer has a grasp of these things. Although she was determined to remember her name, she failed to identify herself.
Alice forgets her name because, according to the gnat, “further on, in the wood down there, they’ve got no names.” The question raised in this passage is focused on what names mean to people. Does it represent a person’s individual ideas, thoughts, actions, etc.? Carroll is trying to get the reader to consider this thought process, while causing the reader to have an identity crisis themselves. Alice states that it would be fun “trying to find the creature that had got [her] old name.” She most likely finds this intriguing because she is still searching for an identity that she will keep when she grows up. Alice could be implying that she will use her name loss to try and see who she will become by ‘trying on,’ so to speak, different identities. However, he excitement soon fades when she can’t remember the name of anything. She longs for the comfort of her name and her identity.
Carroll is trying to convey the fact that a person or objects name is more than just a way for other people to identify it-it’s a way that the person identifies themselves. A name is much more intimate than it seems.