3. It’s a great huge game of chess
that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all,
you know.
This quote occurs in Chapter 2 of Through
the Looking-Glass, as Alice looks out from the hill and
sees a landscape checkered like a chessboard and different characters
stationed on the board like chessmen. Carroll has already introduced
the theme of chess, but Alice’s musing suggest that chess functions
as a metaphor not only for the world of the novel but for our world
as well. Carroll frequently espoused the idea of life as a game.
Like Alice, we are pawns in our own lives, condemned to move forward
through time with little knowledge and understanding of the wider
world. Within our limited perspective, the world seems eminently
ordered and explainable by nature and logic, much like a chessboard’s
symmetrical and geometrical nature evokes a sense of determinable
order.
