The mood of the novel shuttles back and forth between curious fascination and intense frustration. For instance, in Chapter 2, Alice is interested and open-minded about the different rules of the Looking-Glass World until they prove terribly inconvenient:
The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice.
In this passage, Alice and the Red Queen are running toward the other side of the chess board because Alice has said that she would like to go across it. She notices that the "most curious part of the thing" is that no matter how fast they run, she and the Red Queen never pass anything. She is "puzzled," but she keeps running, doing her best to understand and adapt to her new environment.
As they keep running, Alice starts to feel annoyed:
And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried “Faster! Don’t try to talk!”
Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried “Faster! Faster!”, and dragged her along. “Are we nearly there?” Alice managed to pant out at last.
Alice's focus moves from her "curious" surroundings to her own physical discomfort. She is out of breath and can hardly summon the breath to ask, "Are we nearly there?" The mood changes from curious and even a little delighted to irritated as the Looking-Glass World's demands of Alice grow more unreasonable. She is happy to run a bit, but the amount of effort she is putting in to get nowhere feels unfair to her. This transition simulates many people's experience of aging, even once they are already adults. Children and young people are generally very adaptable and will rise to many challenges. But the world can be unfair. Alice's increasing frustration as she fails to reach her destination stands in for the near-universal experience of finding out that the world does not always reward effort in a straightforward way. Alice's dream of the Looking-Glass World ultimately ends when she becomes too frustrated to with all the nonsense to stay there any longer.
