Alice’s invisibility suggests that she maintains a godlike
power over the chessmen of Looking-Glass World, which stems from
the fact that the whole universe exists as part of her imagination.
Alice picks up the White King as if she were a divine power manipulating the
lives of the chess pieces. This establishes the idea of the chessboard
as a plane of existence upon which individuals are positioned like
chess pieces and moved around according to predetermined rules.
Inside the house, Alice’s invisibility allows her to be an unseen hand,
but the image of the chessboard gains its full significance in the
next chapter when she joins the chess game outside. There, Alice becomes
a chess piece herself, manipulated by an unseen hand, presumably
the authorial hand of Carroll. The imposition of this hand starts
to become apparent when Alice loses control over her body and floats
down the stairs, propelled forward toward her destiny by the unseen
hand of the author.
