Alice Through the Looking-Glass (Dramatized) recap

Alice passes through the mirror above the fireplace into a reflected world of living chess pieces. The Red Queen tells her that she is a white pawn who can become a queen by reaching the far side of a landscape laid out as a chessboard. Traveling square by square, Alice rides a peculiar train, loses her name in a wood, meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee beside the sleeping Red King, encounters the backward-living White Queen, discusses language with Humpty Dumpty, and watches the Lion and Unicorn fight. A kindly White Knight guides her to the last brook. Alice crosses it and becomes a queen, but her coronation feast turns chaotic. When she grabs and shakes the Red Queen, the figure becomes her kitten and Alice wakes at home, uncertain whether she dreamed the Red King or existed in his dream.

While playing with her kittens, Alice imagines the room on the other side of the drawing-room mirror and discovers that she can pass through the glass. The reflected room contains living chess pieces, books whose writing must be read in a mirror, and a garden that cannot be reached by walking toward it directly. Outside, flowers speak to her and introduce the Red Queen. The Queen shows Alice that the countryside forms a giant chessboard. Alice agrees to begin as a white pawn and is told that if she reaches the eighth square she will become a queen. She then runs with the Red Queen but finds that they seem to remain beneath the same tree.

Alice enters the next square aboard a train whose passengers include a paper-suited gentleman, a goat, a beetle, and a speaking Gnat. After the train leaps a brook, the Gnat describes strange mirror-world insects. Alice enters a wood where names disappear and briefly walks beside a fawn until both recover their identities and the frightened animal flees. She then meets the identical Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They perform a long poem, show her the sleeping Red King, and insist that Alice exists only in his dream. Their dispute over a damaged rattle leads them to dress for battle, but a huge crow sends everyone running before they can fight.

Alice meets the White Queen, who says that in her world memory reaches into the future and pain may be felt before an injury. As they cross a boundary, the Queen becomes a sheep and their surroundings become a shop, then a little boat. After another abrupt change, Alice buys an egg that becomes Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall. He argues that words mean what he chooses, explains the unfamiliar terms in the mirror poem Alice found, and boasts of royal protection. Their conversation ends with his dismissive farewell, and a tremendous crash soon prompts the King's soldiers to rush toward the scene.

The White King waits with his messengers while the Lion and Unicorn fight for his crown. Alice meets Hatta, who resembles the Hatter, and helps serve food after the combatants pause. Drumming drives the company away. In the next square, a Red Knight tries to claim Alice as his prisoner, but a White Knight defeats him and takes over her escort. The White Knight is gentle and inventive but repeatedly falls from his horse. He demonstrates impractical devices and sings to Alice before bringing her to the edge of the final brook, where they part affectionately.

Alice crosses the brook, a crown appears on her head, and she finds the Red and White Queens beside her. They subject the new queen to a bewildering examination in arithmetic, manners, and logic, then fall asleep against her. Alice later finds an invitation to her own dinner and enters a crowded banquet hall. The dishes introduce themselves and resist being served, speeches overlap, and Alice struggles to exercise any authority. As the room overturns and the guests merge into the confusion, she identifies the Red Queen as the cause and catches hold of her.

Alice shakes the Red Queen until the tiny figure changes into Kitty, the black kitten she had been playing with before crossing the mirror. She is back in the ordinary drawing room, and the banquet and chessboard country have vanished. Alice tries to assign the dream's characters to her pets, then returns to the question raised by Tweedledum and Tweedledee: perhaps she was dreaming the Red King, or perhaps the Red King dreamed her. She asks Kitty to settle whose dream it was, but the story closes without deciding between the possibilities.

After the White Knight escorts Alice to the final brook, she crosses into the eighth square and becomes a queen. The Red and White Queens test her with impossible questions, then fall asleep against her. Alice reaches a banquet supposedly held in her honor, but the guests and food refuse to follow ordinary rules and the celebration descends into confusion. She seizes the Red Queen, whom she holds responsible for the disorder, and shakes her. The Queen dwindles into Kitty, the black kitten, and Alice wakes in her drawing room. She wonders whether the experience was her own dream or the sleeping Red King's, leaving the question unresolved as she asks Kitty what it thinks.