In Chapter 6, Humpty Dumpty claims to be very good with words. As he describes the way he manages them, he personifies them. This personification draws out the situational irony of his claim that he is a wordsmith:
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
Humpty Dumpty claims that verbs, especially, have a "temper" and are the "proudest" of all parts of speech. Adjectives, by contrast, are more docile. Words don't really possess human traits, but Humpty Dumpty imagines that they do because he feels that he can wrestle with them, interpreting any poem and making any meaning he wants to out of words.
The idea that Humpty Dumpty can "manage" words and make meaning out of them is ironic because he himself is the creation of words. Humpty Dumpty comes from a riddle, or word game, to which the answer is "an egg." The fact that he is posturing about his way with words comes through at the end of the passage above: instead of continuing to explain to Alice how he can make words mean what he wants them to mean, he simply cuts the conversation short by shouting, "Impenetrability! That's what I say!" When it gets too difficult to make words make sense, he can simply call them "impenetrable" and move on.
Carroll is making light fun of literary criticism that tries too seriously to wrestle meaning out of everything. Some literary critics stop analyzing as soon as words stop making sense, claiming "impenetrability." Carroll, as a pioneer of "nonsense literature," is always playing with the idea of "impenetrability." His work challenges the idea that "logical" words and ideas always make sense when we look at them closely. It also challenges the idea that we can't mine any meaning out of things that look like they make no sense at all. Humpty Dumpty is a silly caricature of literary critics who refuse to approach their work lightheartedly enough or to let words take them into playful new terrain.
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?
