In Chapter 5, Alice finds herself rowing through water with the Sheep. The Sheep uses a sarcastic idiom, "complimenting" Alice on "catching a crab," which leads to dramatic irony:
“That was a nice crab you caught!” she remarked, as Alice got back into her place, very much relieved to find herself still in the boat.
“Was it? I didn’t see it,” said Alice, peeping cautiously over the side of the boat into the dark water. “I wish it hadn’t let go—I should so like a little crab to take home with me!” But the Sheep only laughed scornfully, and went on with her knitting.
What Alice doesn't realize is that "catching a crab" is a rowing term that refers to messing up a stroke of the oar by keeping it underwater too long. This is exactly what Alice has just done: she lost control of the oar and could not pull it out of the water. It ended up hitting her in the chin and knocking her over in the boat. Alice believes that the Sheep is telling her she caught a literal crustacean. Because she does not understand the rowing idiom, she fails to understand that the Sheep is making fun of her bad rowing form.
On the one hand, Alice appears naive because of her misunderstanding. A more savvy and socially graceful person would understand that they were the butt of the Sheep's joke. At the same time, Alice has been thrown into a ridiculous situation without any preparation. The Sheep's expectation that she know how to row and that she be familiar with the idiomatic language of rowing is just as laughable as Alice's naivety. This entire situation represents the process of growing up and making one's way in the adult world. Life, Carroll suggests, is a series of ridiculous and unexpected situations in which the world has ridiculous expectations of our competence and know-how.
In Chapter 7, Alice meets a Unicorn who is surprised to meet a real-life human child. The Unicorn uses a twist on an idiom that helps convey a sense of situational irony:
“This is a child!” Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to introduce her, and spreading out both his hands towards her in an Anglo-Saxon attitude. “We only found it to-day. It’s as large as life, and twice as natural!”
“I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn.
The phrase "as large as life, and quite as natural" often refers to renderings of the real world in art. Realism was a major art movement in the mid-19th century: artists tried to paint the real world just as they saw it. The idea of a painting as "large as life, and quite as natural" is complimentary, meaning that the painting is a faithful, successful reproduction. Here, the Unicorn calls Alice "as large as life, and twice as natural." This phrase, which became something of an idiom in its own right after Carroll published Through the Looking-Glass, suggests that the unicorn sees Alice as a work of art that has come to life. She is almost supernatural, eerily giving movement to the images of human children the Unicorn has only seen in art.
It is ironic that the Unicorn sees Alice as a work of art come to life because, to Alice, the Unicorn itself is a living manifestation of a mythical creature she has only seen in paintings and in her imagination. The idea that Alice is the strange, fantastical creature in this situation is an example of the many inversions of the Looking-Glass World. Not only is this a strange and fantastical world for Alice to explore, but it also reflects the "real" world and makes it look just as bizarre. This exchange raises the question of what "reality" really is. Does each one of us have our own version of reality?
