*Note to Mr. Long and other visitors to our project:
This post will intentionally not count towards my minimum requirement of blogs for the entire project. It’s just for fun and letting of emotion.
[insert dumb virtual smiley face here]
I have a question for my fellow classmates:
Do you honestly think we could be analyzing Alice’s adventures without first deciphering Lord of the Flies?
Yes, we were intelligent before tenth grade English (if I may toot our horns), but do you all think that Lord of the Flies helped substantially towards our ability to really understand what Carroll wrote?
Why or why not?
Darcy S.
Connor S.
Devon H.
Morgan P.
Scott Mitchell
Alice's Pack of Cards 
Love the question that sparked the responses (thus far). And I have tremendous respect for Hagen and Kathy in terms of their multi-layered responses. Well done all the way around. If anyone was curious *if* a group of students could truly engage a topic in such a loosely-connected, multi-blog project, this short conversation would be proof-positive. Nice work, y’all.
I think do think that our analyses of Lord of the Flies, helped us to decipher the bigger ideas in Alices Adventures in Wonderland. Lord of the Flies is one of those stories that you can read and simply understand to be a group of boys on an island and they must survive. The book is not that simple though, and we must further see what Golding is “shouting” to us. Each main character represents a different topic, but without analyses, we could not see this. We would simply take the story for what it is.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is another one of those books that you can just read as a simple children’s story about a girl named Alice. There is a bigger picture in the story of Alice, though. If one closer analyses Alice’s story you can see bigger ideas conveyed through the seemingly simple story of Alice.
Yes, I do believe that discovering the symbolism in Lord of the Flies better prepared us to be able to discover the symbolism in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Lord of the Flies was simply a warm-up.
First of all, kudos for the question. I think the answer depends upon your perspective. I think that our knowledge of “Lord of the Flies” when reading “Alice” will either serve as a great aid to us when we are analyzing it, or our greatest detriment.
In “Lord of the Flies”, there was nothing that was meaningless. We spend about 30 minutes in class one time discussing the significance of a boulder being pushed off a cliff and into the forest, and for good reason. However, do all authors write as symbolically as Golding? Should all books be analyzed to the point that “Lord of the Flies” absolutely must be?
If so, then I absolutely think that reading and analyzing “Lord of the Flies” was an important and necessary step to take before digging into the world of Wonderland. I doubt that any of us were capable of analyzing books to the extent that “Lord of the Flies” forced us to before reading it this year. After that novel, I doubt that we will ever approach a book in the same way again. We will be constantly analyzing for symbolism and deeper meaning, possibly to a point where we look for something that just isn’t there. The question is, will we be able to discern where that point is? We could chase nearly any rabbit in “Lord of the Flies” and end up somewhere meaningful, but is that much analysis required for a book written for a young girl?
I think that in order to answer your question, we’d finally have to answer the question of whether or not “Alice” should be analyzed. If it should be, then the answer is yes, “Lord of the Flies” was a substantial help towards our ability to understand Carroll’s meaning behind the innocent story. If the answer is no, however, then it may be an injustice to the story to try to find deeper meaning in the same way that we did for “Lord of the Flies”, for we will be searching for something that just isn’t there.