I am so excited about being back in school I can barely contain myself. I got a chance today to go off topic with my 6th period, basing much of what I said on an email exchange I had with Raechel over the summer. Raechel was stuck on her essay comparing the anonymous Go Ask Alice with Alice Siebold's The Lovely Bones, and I shot some ideas her way. For those of you still wondering what kind of connections I'm looking for, I'm posting part of my response email here:
You may have noticed that the title of Go Ask Alice is an allusion to lyrics of the song "White Rabbit" by Grace Slick (of the '60's psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane). Here are a few of the lyrics to the song:
One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall
"White Rabbit," in turn, is an allusion to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. You'll also find that the narrator of Go Ask Alice herself refers to Carroll's creation in the entry dated July 14: "I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Maybe Lewis G. Carroll was on drugs too." What does this all mean? If you've seen the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, you may recall that the action begins when Alice chases the white rabbit into a hole which takes her to a fantastical version of reality. The narrator of Go Ask Alice likewise enters a sort of metaphorical rabbit hole when she experiences drugs for the first time at her friend Jill's party. The rest of the book, like Alice in Wonderland, chronicles her efforts to crawl back out of the hole.
In The Lovely Bones, Susie, like Alice, enters a literal hole in the ground in the first chapter- and as with the narrator of Go Ask Alice, Susie will not leave the hole alive. These "rabbit holes" serve as tangible versions of a common device in young adult literature: the rite of passage. What is unique about these books (as opposed to, say, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which the Pevensie kids are able to come and go from the land of Narnia via the wardrobe) is that once the characters enter they don't ever come out. Both books are narrated by a girl from beyond the grave, and both leave us to wonder what their lives would have been like if they could have pulled themselves out.
