Allegory and myth characterize both Lewis’ and Carroll’s writing, as Paul Piehler in his essay Myth or Allegory? Archetype and Transcendence in the Fiction of C.S. Lewis states, “Lewis’s sharp theoretical distinction between allegory and symbolism is by no means original with him, but goes back as far as the critical writing of Coleridge” (201). To validate each story’s merit irrespective of setting and plot you must first consider how these element’s interconnectivity with each other are a necessary part of the process. Dabney Hart in Through the Open Door A New Look at C.S. Lewis explains that, “the concept of myth as the basis of literature depends on Lewis’s theory that allegory is inherent in the human imagination…that the essence of thought and language is allegorical” (14).

Lewis and Carroll exploit the mundane with stark imagery that mutually excites and moves the reader to invest themselves in the characters while simultaneously welcoming the reader to become one with a particular passage in the book where there is at once a “realization of the insensible in terms of the sensible” (Hart 14). Their genius is exalted when the impossible becomes possible, the implausible plausible, and the improbable probable as the story implores you to come along for the journey. Lewis and Carroll knew that the reader, once charmed by their words, would have to be dragged away kicking and screaming. The events of each story, AW and LWW, beckon us to enter the rabbit hole or wardrobe, “the sort that has a looking-glass door” and in an instant be “standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow” under your feet and “snowflakes falling through the air” (Lewis 4).

David Holbrook in his book, The Skeleton in the Wardrobe, ascertains that “there are many common or archetypal features of this kind of symbolic story – passages, books, mirrors, changes of landscape – indeed a whole topography…as in Carroll’s Alice, with metaphorical features with a…spiritual significance. There are castles, dungeons, lakes, seas, and of course, other worlds, often approached by holes in the ground, or through attics or passages” (30).

But where do these extraordinary ideas come from? Its obvious, and shamelessly so, that Lewis openly borrowed from previous classics, including Carroll’s Wonderland, and made some of their conventions his own, almost as if his creativity needed a frame work wherein it could blossom on its own. Like Gray, Ronald Reichertz makes an examination of Carroll’s uses of earlier children’s literature in his study, The Making of the Alice Books. He pays particular homage to the creativity of Carroll, asserting that it is one of his “remarkable gifts that he is able to take material that is diametrically in opposition to fantasy…and give it a home in his fantasies” (32).

Reichertz admires Carroll for remaining independent and blazing the trail for a new form of writing absent the “norms of existing antagonistic genres” (32). Lewis and Carroll both took liberties with everyday items and employed familiar inanimate objects to give their stories life; objects that are obvious and identifiable, like the wardrobe, looking glass, lamppost, playing cards, even food. They also incorporate the use of speech in real world animals, like the Lion, rabbit, dormouse, and cat as well as mythical beasts like the Gryphon and Faun. Reichertz believes that Carroll “absorbs or turns such material back on itself through parody, allowing the Alice books to transform the many attacks on imagination… into fantasy” (32).

Michael Holquist, in his critical essay What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism asserts Carroll’s views about writing Fairy Tales; “it is a fiction, a thing which does not seek to be ‘real’ or ‘true’” (397). Another critical essayist, Robert Polhemus, in his paper, The Comedy of Regression, speaks to the ability of “Carroll’s words and images… (to) create a fiction so radical that it can bring its audience to look with fresh wonder at the structure and meaning of experience” (365).