I'm starting to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and I'm reading the introduction.....?

Question

and it states that it is an "anti narrative." What exactly does that mean?

Answer 1

A narrative is a story that - logically enough - has a narrator. This narrator isn't necessarily the author, but can be any consistant personality that is fairly well grounded in a certain time and place. So 'The Three Musketeers' is a pretty good example of a narrative story in that it begins, ends, and is largely told from the perspective of one person who SEEMS like a person (D'Artagnan, in that case). A narrative tells a story - it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' might be thought of as an anti-narrative in that this is exactly what is NOT happening. You might say that instead of the character Alice telling the story, it is the story that is telling Alice (and if you think that's confusing, wait until you get to the actual story).

To put it another way, Alice doesn't really have much of a personality to speak of. Her presence seems to merely be a focus through which we can see the events. There is no particular stamp that she puts upon them... rather, she usually seems to be the victim of circumstance, wandering almost randomly from point to point. Indeed, the whole world seems to swirl about randomly.

Likewise with the idea of a story arc. If you picked a chapter at random, it would be difficult at best to determine where in the course of the story the chapter occurs. There is no special reason why one scene generally occurs before another. Things don't much build upon each other, and you know you're at the end of the story largely because you run out of pages.

So the point of an anti-narrative isn't really to tell a story, or get to know a person, fictional or otherwise. What does that leave? Such stories often serve as a kind of (distorted) mirror of the real world... this one is no exception to that. Anti-narratives also often serve to evoke a more emotional and less rational reaction from their readers, much like their surreal analogues in the art world.

Answer 2

Alice in wonderland is all about un-things, like the un-birthday so i would say that the anti narrative would be like not a narrative so look in the back of the book does it have some thing that is called the narrative

Answer 3

It means don't expect this story to unfold in a logical way.

Answer 4

maybe it means that as the reader you are supposed to take it as reality... maybe it takes place within the imagination whereby you are not reading a story you are experiencing it.

Answer 5

It's a "refusal to be coherent," or surrealistic style.