• Anupama Maitra

In The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner writes: “Few would dispute the fact that Jabberwocky is the greatest of all nonsense poems in English. It was so well known to English schoolboys in the late nineteenth century that five of its nonsense words appear casually in the conversation of students in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co.” (Gardner, 234). This short poem has been translated into as many as fifty languages and has even inspired a movie based upon it. Although this much-feted poem is written in apparent gibberish, it nevertheless seems to make some kind of sense. This poses certain interpretive challenges for the reader, as words that are clearly nonsense seem to somehow gesture at a semblance of meaning. This paper attempts to decode the strategies employed by Carroll in order to achieve this effect.

Meaning, Nonsense, Content words, Function words, Structuralism

"Making Sound Sense: Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 7, page no.c315-c317, July-2022, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2207236.pdf

"Making Sound Sense: Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 7, page no. ppc315-c317, July-2022, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2207236.pdf