Which Alice?

ALICE IN PUZZLE-LAND
such names as the "unexpected examination" and the "unexpected
hanging." (You can read about it in the first chapter of my book,
The Unexpected Hanging.) Humpty is not sure whether his elegant
compression of this puzzle is a genuine paradox or not, and you
won't be either after you understand it. As Humpty exclaims,
"That's the beautiful part of it!"
In his chapter about the White Knight, Carroll tells us: "Of all the
strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through the Looking-
Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly.
Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it
had been only yesterday. . . ."
Ray has not forgotten. "Of all Alice's puzzle-adventures in the
Looking-Glass," he begins Chapter Nine, "the ones that follow were
those she remembered most vividly. For years after, she kept telling
her friends these fascinating and unusual puzzles." Yes, and you
would swear it is Carroll's own White Knight who has tumbled off
his horse into Ray's pages.
At the close of Carroll's second Alice book, Alice wonders if she
has dreamed about the Red King, or if she is only a sort of thing in
the Red King's dream. In his last two chapters, Ray weaves brilliant
puzzle themes around the act of dreaming. His book ends with the
Red King presenting Alice with a question about dreams that is so
confusing and so deep that, as Carroll did, Ray wisely leaves it
unanswered.
No one can read this book, or any of Ray's books, without
becoming more aware of the mystery of being, of the difficulty of
distinguishing what is true from what is false, or what is real from
what is unreal. That's the beautiful part of them. And you close this
book knowing that Ray has shown you only a small part of the
fantastic puzzle tricks he has up his conjuror's sleeves, that he is
speaking through the Duchess when she says, "As to confusing
puzzles, these are nothing compared to some I could tell you if I
chose!"
Hendersonville, North Carolina
—MARTIN GARDNER
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