So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
Boredom with her sister's book "without pictures or conversations" causes Alice to drift suddenly into a dream-world: The appearance of the White Rabbit, both in picture and in prose, shows how the author and the illustrator ease Alice (and her surrogate explorer, the reader) into Wonderland. Visual illustration immediately immerses the reader into the book's world, though Tenniel, echoing Carroll's strategy for his fantastic writing, uses aspects of the familiar as points of departure to track Alice's descent further and further into Wonderland's madness. In addition to Lewis Carroll's verbal conception of the fantastical, his illustrator John Tenniel enlarges Wonderland with visual portrayals of fantastic inversion and alterations of perspective and relative size. Continuous border-violations and inversions therefore become characteristic of Alice in Wonderland's fantasy, as Eric Rabkin points out: "the fantastic is fantastic, then, not by virtue of simply violating some rules we have picked up in the real world, but by virtue of reversing the ground rules we are following at any given moment of reading" (20). Lewis Carroll demonstrates the lawless nature of Wonderland through fantastical inversions of logic, like having to walk away from a destination in order to achieve it, and of nature, like a rabbit which can talk and wear a waistcoat. In Wonderland, she is the only person with self-control" (9). She has to learn for example to walk away from a place in order to reach it. Auden describes: "In Wonderland, Alice has to adjust herself to a life without laws. Alice's experiences are much more jarring to her sense of reality, as W. While encountering a fire-breathing dragon may seem remarkably fantastical to a reader of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, though admittedly terrified of the creature, recognizes the dragon as part of his world and possesses skills with which to combat it.
Works like fairy tales, on the contrary, present self-contained worlds to which their characters are accustomed.
Alice in Wonderland is especially demonstrative of the fantasy genre because Alice, a stranger to Wonderland, realizes the fantastical nature of the world that surrounds her and must constantly work to navigate and understand it. Wonderland presents her with a myriad of shifting categories boundaries - such as those between animal and human, decorum and rudeness, order and chaos - are continually violated. Once Alice falls through the rabbit-hole into Wonderland, the reality that surrounds her undergoes profound change while her strategies for dealing with that reality do not.