Alice changes shape so often she begins to wonder whether she is still herself
Alice grows and shrinks at least a dozen times across the two books — by drink, by cake, by mushroom, by fan, by sheer emotional weather — and at one point becomes uncertain whether she has been swapped overnight for some other little girl. The Caterpillar puts the question directly: Who are you? Alice cannot answer, because she has been so many sizes that morning she no longer feels like a fixed quantity. It is, for a children’s book, a remarkably patient meditation on the suspicion that the self is mostly a habit of scale.