It ’s difficult to put your fingerbreadth on what it is about classical stories likeFrank Herbert’sDuneand Lewis Carroll’sAlice ’s Adventures in Wonderlandthat keeps us coming back to and reimagining them over and over again . But in the case of those two novels , at least some of the answer becomes clearer when you reckon them as texts in rhyme with one another .
InDuneand Alice ’s Adventures in Wonderland , young white multitude from privileged backgrounds find themselves channelise to strange world where their senses of self and perceptions of reality are torn asunder while they ’re under the influence of mind - altering substances . Different as the housing ofAliceand theKwisatz Haderach’srespective risky venture are , they both speak to our deep - seat , and often mussy enthrallment with tales of people who become existentially recede ( while blitz ) before finding themselves .
Before Dune brings Paul Atreides face - to - face with one of the awe - inspiringsandworms of Arrakis , or exhibit him to the spiciness that unlocks new astuteness of his sinful abilities , the novel first point how the prince’sBene Gesserit - trained powers of observation are what gives him his edge . Though most of what Paul understand about the macrocosm is form by what he acquire from watching his Father-God and breeding with Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck , Lady Jessica goes to bang-up length to ensure that her boy is raise as a royal stag who understands the mightiness that comes from being calculating .
Who are you?Image: Disney/Warner Bros.
Imaginative as Alice ’s Adventures in Wonderland ’s vernal heroine is , it ’s debatable whether she might be capable to see any of herself reflected in Paul Atreides and his far - flung liveliness in other galaxy . But the way that Alice consistentlyclings to logicto ground herself as she tumbles deeper and deeper into Wonderland does congratulate Dune ’s depiction of Paul grappling with the transformational shifts in his living that follow his arrival on Arrakis . Compared to Paul — for whom spiciness is the primary transformative accelerator — Alice ends up consume a much broader array of mysterious philosophers' stone and baked good that alter her in one fashion or another . But Arrakis and Wonderland can be read as similar billet that at once wedge Paul and Alice , severally , to think who they are in the heroic scheme of their new environment .
Alice ’s Adventures in Wonderland is quite direct and genuine about how Wonderland itself exchange Alice before she downs an philosopher’s stone that recoil her to a minuscule size . Prior to her first size change , the many tiny door she finds whilechasing the White Rabbitdown the hole effectively “ make ” Alice larger than she understands herself to be . Alice ’s reasoning for imbibe the liquid that earn her small has less to do with any wish to be a few inch grandiloquent , and more to do with her desire to travel further into Wonderland , a place that require her to become many different variant of herself as she encounters raw multitude .
Throughout Dune , Paul reflects on how simply being on Arrakis for an extended period of time begins to wake up a new kind of understanding of others that alarms him at first . This abstruse perception is something Paul has in common with Lady Jessica , but one of Dune ’s most pivotal moments focuses on the mother and son acknowledging how his exposure to the spicery determine in everything on Arrakis has begun to set the two apart in a profound manner . For all of the way that spice focalise Paul ’s weed and provides him brainwave about the dear future tense in heartbeat , he still stumbles through the present tense on Arrakis as the feud between Houses Atreides and Harkonnen order his 24-hour interval - to - Clarence Shepard Day Jr. life .
Image: Macmillan
Where Dune is much more explicit and lineal in the way it deploys its thought about narcotics and orientalist fetishism , Wonderland instead works in broad metaphors couched in fantasy aimed at children . Though Wonderland ’s caterpillar does n’t sport as largely in that story as Dune ’s sandworms do theirs , the characters play somewhat similar role as shape of the Otherness that defines the situation they derive from . Wonderland never specify what the caterpillar is puffing from the hookah he periodically takes drags from during his first encounter with Alice . But the novel ’s specific mention of the cat ’s waterpipe works as a way of coding the creature as a kind ofstand - in for the Middle Eastern and North African cultures and peopleassociated with the equipment — both of which were the objects of vivid , and often problematic , fascination during the late 19th century when Wonderland was first published .
The caterpillar ’s foreignness to Alice is part of what both fascinates and confound her about him as the two begin their roundabout discourse about who she is and how she might go about growing bombastic and minor during her travels . When the caterpillar asks Alice who she is , she initially assumes that it ’s only asking for her name , but the cat ’s dissatisfaction with her answers verbalise to how what he ’s really looking for is a bit of self-contemplation from the young girl . The true nature and long - live repercussions of Paul ’s relationship with the sandworms are only hinted at in Herbert ’s first Dune novel and inDenis Villeneuve ’s first flick . The novel ’s creature do n’t question Paul directly about whether or not he knows if he ’s the Kwisatz Haderach , but they act an important use in how he come to understand his place on Arrakis . Confounding as Paul finds the sandworms at first , and the way they only seem interested in do devastation , he start to see them in a drastically different visible light as House Harkonnen incite on House Atreides in an attack that forces Paul to join forces with Chani and the rest of the Fremen .
The onslaught of Paul ’s prophetic dreams about how his influence will dissemble the bow of history is n’t a direct result of anything the sandworms do to him , but as parts of Arrakis and the source of the planet ’s spice , they ’re a necessary constituent of the evolution he undergo within Dune . Alice ’s time in Wonderland — all of which turns out to be a dreaming — is more fanciful at times than the coup d’oeil of the future Paul receives , but the images in both youth ’ heads similarly leave alone them even more funny about the domain around them than they first were .
Screenshot: Warner Bros.
As Martin Gardner notes in The Annotated Alice , Wonderland ’s a novel that lends itself to an unknowable number of emblematic and allegorical interpretation — which is a feature rather than a bug with idiotic prose . The parallel between Dune and Alice ’s Adventures in Wonderland may be wholly concurrent , but it does n’t make these partake in tale oddity any less curious and bewitching to think about .
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