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Lesson: The plot is very different from the story.

Alice in Wonderland is a very familiar story for the most part. A girl goes to another world and eventually returns from it. The plot has changed from iteration to iteration, the events changing time and again, leaving in only a few key bits throughout the instances. The confusion between Wonderland and Looking Glass has almost made it so that they are better thought of as one book rather than two.

But there seems to be a big disconnect between the plot of Alice in Wonderland and the story of it. The plot is that in every chapter, Alice finds something new in Wonderland, talks to it, gets confused, then parts from it to never speak of it again. This proceeds throughout both books until she leaves at the end of each. As near as I can tell, the plot doesn’t even seem to give her a motivation in this. She is simply in Wonderland, walking, and then she leaves. Not terribly compelling, honestly, though it does give you a nice chance to look at the set pieces.

The story of Alice in Wonderland, however, is a different beast all together. After reading it for the first time, I remembered it as the story of a girl plunged and lost in a fantastical world trying to find her way back home. The internal logic was the only thing that made sense and she had to figure out their riddles in order to get home. Upon rereading it, the plot didn’t have many of these elements in it, but that was what I took away and the story that I remember.

The plot consists of only the events that actually happen in a work. The story is what we interpret those events into, from the motivations of characters to the way events link together when it’s not explicitly stated. And the story, if done right, can turn out to be an entirely different beast from the plot. It’s not a bad thing in the least, but it’s interesting to see happen.