Through out Alice in Wonderland,by Lewis Carroll Alice is always found in an odd situations. These situations cause her question everything that occurs around her and find an explanation if necessary. While her attempt at trying to figure out what is happening to her is a sign of intelligence, her thoughts themselves end up being just as nonsensical or odd as the situation she is in. Alice’s thoughts begin in a reasonable place but she loses focus and her thoughts stray from their origin. Worse yet when she encounters a problem she failed to solve on her first attempt she becomes discouraged and cries.On the other hand even while she is in this state she actually still tells herself to keep a level head and think things through. This could be attributed to her age(which is believed, by scholars, to be seven based on her age in the sequel stories) but since her age is never explicitly stated one could argue against this. There is one scene in particular that shows just how dysfunctional Alice’s thoughts are. When she is at the white rabbits and she grows enormous, she takes talks about growing up but thinks that because her height is already larger than it should be she assumes she has already grown up. This shows she attributes aging to her height and nothing else. This scene immediately made her appear like a dimwit.
While Alice does not regularly have brilliant thoughts, or the ability to keep one thought in her mind for too long, she does display at least one good trait: the ability to learn. This is shown whenever she is in a situation that alters her physical height. When she first turned small she knew that she had to find something else to eat in order to change to her normal height. This is the only consistent thing in her thinking. Whenever she finds her height changed she knows she must eat something to alter her height.
I do not agree with the fact that Alice’s herself is a dimwit based on her thoughts as many of her thoughts are those of a child, and throughout the book it is stated that she is a child. If anything her thoughts are more naive than dimwitted, which one can not blame her for as many adults have thoughts that one might consider naive. Alice’s thoughts though are of a child who is thrown into a magical land where she is experiencing changes to physical appearance constantly, so it is safe to assume that Alice’s thought would be naive or dimwitted.
It’s not Alice’s thoughts that make her naive, or dimwitted, but her actions that all her to be classified as such. When Alice is in the white Rabbits house she picks up a bottle that has no sign on it or has any indication of what is to happen, yet Alice is aware that “something interesting is sure to happen”, and still decides to drink the bottle in side the Rabbits little house. This is a perfect example of Alice’s naiveness or dimwittedness as she even knew that something was going to happen, but not what and instead of thinking about what could happen she drinks it and grows to big and gets stuck in the Rabbits house.
Alice’s naiveness does not start or finish there as there are many examples of Alice not thinking before doing something in Wonderland and the fact that she does not think before the actions is what makes her naive or dimwitted.