Mystified Life: Joyce Carol Oates’ Adaptation of Wonderland

Abstract It is apodictic that postmodernism gravitates towards fragmented narratives, apparently “real” diegesis and characters in a chaos-ridden frame. The postmodern novel is a “looking glass” that delineates the vertigo instigated by “reality,” which is an artifice that leads to amending interpretations. The paradox of “fictionalizing the reality” creates heterogeneous reverberations among individuals. There is no preconception, but moments of revelation and realization. The theories of language alleviate the transcription of the intense and inevitable relationship between the text and the reader. The theoretical underpinnings, formulated on the basis of the multiple interpretations emanated by readers, foreground the fact that texts are constituents of our linguistic community, and are diversified with individual and cultural experiences. In this way, the consideration of the text extends beyond its stature of being a mere “object.” Joyce Carol Oates’ Wonderland is a text which abounds in intertextual references in the postmodern context. Oates has taken up the issues of destiny and identity from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as the thematic source. The protagonist, Jesse, does not enter a world of fantasy; rather, she enters a world that is real, absurd and phantasmagorical. The article purports to analyse Wonderland as “hypertext” and accentuate how the fragments of discourses in it, based on Carroll’s work as the hypotext, have acquired a transpositional change of meaning.