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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Triumph of Good Over Evil

The story recounted in “Jabberwocky” is, at its heart, a very traditional heroic narrative in which an unassuming hero sets out to defeat an improbably dangerous enemy. For this reason, the boy’s success in slaying the Jabberwock evokes the most classic theme of heroic narrative: the triumph of good over evil. That said, there’s a satirical edge in the way the poem conveys this message. For starters, consider how short the poem is. The speaker compresses the boy’s entire quest into seven quatrains—or just five, if we remember that the identical first and last stanzas have no narrative content. When we recall that comparable narrative poems, like the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, require thousands of lines of verse to relate the heroic feats of their protagonists, the twenty-eight lines of “Jabberwocky” seem pitifully inadequate. Given the poem’s evident absurdity and mock-serious tone, it would be reasonable to interpret the poem’s brevity as gently satirical. In other words, the poem evokes the theme of good’s triumph over evil in a way that playfully indicates how overdone that theme is.

The Enticement of Distorted Meaning

Throughout the poem, Carroll uses nonce words to distort meaning in ways that entice the reader into curiosity. Like many other examples of light verse from the nineteenth century, readers frequently refer to “Jabberwocky” as a nonsense poem. However, it’s somewhat misleading to call “Jabberwocky” utter nonsense. For one thing, the poem uses standard English grammar and syntax, which makes it possible to recognize distinct parts of speech (e.g., nouns, verbs, etc.). It also enables us readers to understand the basic story being related, even if we don’t grasp the meaning of every word. For another thing, Carroll invented many of his nonce words by mashing together words that already existed in English. A made-up word like “slithy,” though initially unfamiliar, nonetheless contains familiar sounds. English speakers will likely hear “slithy” as a mixture of two common words: “lithe” and “slimy.” For these reasons, “Jabberwocky” isn’t really a nonsense poem. Instead, it would be better to describe the poem as employing linguistic tactics that partially distort sense. Since the distortion is only partial, it has an enticing effect on readers, inviting them to pay close attention and get actively curious about what the words might mean.

The Joy of Language

The speaker of “Jabberwocky” clearly takes great pleasure in the possibilities of language. From the poem’s very first line, the speaker experiments with English, making up words with a wide range of sounds and textures. The sheer musicality of the language offers a distinct pleasure to the reader. Regardless of what the individual words mean, it’s often fun just say them out loud. In addition to finding joy in the sounds of words, the speaker also explores how language can be used to create an imaginative world that exists apart from the “real” world. The opening stanza provides a particularly good example of imaginative world building. Though we readers may not initially understand many of the words, the words nonetheless convey a clear impression that we are entering a fantastical realm. In Carroll’s poem, then, language becomes not just a tool for telling a story. It also becomes the source of a joyful game capable of inspiring curiosity and wonder.

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