Throughout the semester, I have been interested in the pedagogy of difficult texts.  One of the reasons I chose “Jabberwocky” for my final textual analysis paper and lesson plan was because of its assumed nonsensical meaning.  I had read the poem as a child in Alice in Wonderland and had analyzed it with a group of fourth graders when I worked as a reading assistant.  The fourth graders and I translated the first stanza into sensible English via Carroll’s coinages.  The students enjoyed the exercise and found Carroll’s language play amusing, but they were probably beyond confused with Carroll’s ability to twist word meaning into a translatable text.  Could they have constructed similar gibberish on their own?  Surely.  Could they have interpreted Carroll’s meaning without the definitions he provided?  Probably not, and this fact supports why Carroll’s writing never requires interpretation.

The allure of “Jabberwocky” comes from its ability to seem nonsensical while standing up to syntactical analysis at the same time.  Young readers love Carroll because he does not explain away the magic of his writing; literary critics love Carroll because he shows meaning through his textual riddles.  Only through Carroll’s additional characters and informational texts will the reader gain access to the meaning behind his language play.   

Carroll provides a literal translation of Jabberwocky in a letter to the Girls’ Latin School in Boston: “ ‘the Anglo-Saxon word ‘wocer’ or ‘wocor’ signifies ‘offspring’ or ‘fruit.’  Taking ‘jabber’ in its ordinary acceptation of ‘excited and voluble discussion,’ this would give the meaning of ‘the result of much excited discussion’” (The Annotated Alice 195).  Carroll’s mystical creature exists to promote “excited discussion.” Any reader or critic of Carroll’s writing must agree that his “nonsensical” poetry does exactly that.