Between Registers: A Literary Analysis of Voice, Translation, and Linguistic Play

By Dr. Helena Thornwell

Chessboard College Review of Literary Studies

To approach “Alice in Wonderland: Emoji Edition” as a work of literature rather than a cultural artifact or pedagogical tool requires that we temporarily set aside questions of value judgment—whether emoji “belong” in literature, whether modernization serves or betrays Carroll—and instead examine what this text does with language, how it constructs narrative voice, and what literary effects it achieves or fails to achieve through its particular choices of register, diction, and visual supplementation.

The Problem of Narrative Voice

Lewis Carroll’s original creates a complex narratorial position: a third-person voice that maintains ironic distance from Alice while occasionally collapsing into free indirect discourse, allowing us access to her thoughts while preserving the narrator’s amused, slightly condescending Victorian adult perspective.

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversations?’”

The phrase “very tired” is narratorial distance; “what is the use of a book” is Alice’s voice breaking through. The tension between these registers creates much of the text’s charm.

Slavenskoj’s version collapses this distinction. “Super bored,” “so lame,” and “literally nothing” appear in both the narrative voice and Alice’s interior monologue. We have moved from free indirect discourse to what we might call “uniform register narration”—everything speaks in the same contemporary idiom.

This is not inherently a failure, but it represents a fundamental shift in the text’s literary architecture. Carroll’s narrator is an adult remembering/observing childhood; Slavenskoj’s narrator is a peer, speaking from within the same linguistic community as the protagonist.

The Emoji as Textual Element

From a purely literary standpoint, divorced from debates about legitimacy or taste, what do the emoji do in the text?

First, they function as visual punctuation, creating emphasis and rhythm. When Alice encounters “this White 🐰 with pink 👁️s,” the emoji draws the eye, slowing reading speed and foregrounding the described elements. This is not unlike the typographical games Carroll himself played (the Mouse’s tail poem, the varied fonts in some editions).

Second, they serve as register markers, signaling that we are in a contemporary, digitally-mediated linguistic space. Just as Carroll’s original is marked by Victorian diction that signals its temporal location, the emoji mark this text as existing in the age of digital communication.

Third, and most interestingly, they create dual signification. The word “rabbit” denotes the animal; the 🐰 both denotes and shows. This is not mere redundancy but a kind of literary iconicity—the sign resembling what it represents.

However, the emoji also create a curious semantic flattening. When every rabbit is 🐰, when every hole is 🕳️, we lose the possibility of adjectival variation. Carroll can have “white rabbits” and “wild rabbits”; with 🐰, the image is fixed. This trades linguistic flexibility for visual immediacy.

Thematic Preservation

Carroll’s themes—identity instability, the arbitrariness of rules, the absurdity of adult authority, the terror of bodily transformation—all survive. The existential questions remain:

“I barely know, sir, right now—I mean, I knew who I was when I woke up this morning, but I think I’ve changed like a million times since then.”

“Changed like a million times” is hyperbolic contemporary speech, but the identity crisis is genuine. The philosophical depth isn’t lost; it’s re-coded.

Similarly, the social satire of the caucus-race, the mad tea party, the Queen’s arbitrary justice—these translate well because they critique timeless power structures. Absurdist bureaucracy, performative activity, authoritarian caprice—these don’t require Victorian diction to sting.

The Adaptation as Palimpsest

Perhaps the most productive way to read this text literarily is as palimpsest—Carroll’s narrative structure visible beneath a contemporary linguistic surface. Like a medieval manuscript where earlier text shows through later writing, this adaptation lets us see both texts simultaneously.

This creates a rich reading experience for those familiar with the original: we read Slavenskoj’s words while “hearing” Carroll’s beneath them. Each translation choice becomes interpretive, highlighting what the adapter considers essential versus contingent.

For instance, preserving the logical puzzles (the problems about falling speed, latitude/longitude, the Mad Hatter’s riddles) while updating the emotional register suggests an interpretation: Carroll’s genius lies in narrative logic, not Victorian linguistic texture.

This is competent, often skillful work that understands Carroll’s literary mechanisms well enough to transpose them into a new register. It’s not a perfect translation—no translation is—but it makes intelligent choices about what to preserve (structure, logic, theme) and what to sacrifice (period-specific texture, tonal complexity, register variation).

As a literary experiment in cross-temporal adaptation, it succeeds in creating a readable, structurally sound text that preserves much of Carroll’s narrative magic while testing the proposition that such magic can survive radical linguistic transformation.

The answer appears to be: yes, substantially, though not without losses. The core of Carroll’s achievement—his narrative inventiveness, his logical playfulness, his satirical vision—proves remarkably durable across registers. What’s lost is primarily the specific texture of Victorian prose and the subtle ironies created by narratorial distance.

Whether one prefers this version to the original is a matter of taste. Whether it succeeds as a literary work—as a text that creates meaning through language, structure, and narrative technique—is more objective. By those standards, it succeeds more often than it fails.

Dr. Helena Thornwell is Professor of Comparative Literature at Chessboard College, specializing in adaptation studies, narrative theory, and Victorian literature. Her books include Translation as Interpretation: Literary Adaptation Across Registers and The Alice Texts: 150 Years of Wonderland Transformations.