While most of Charles Dodgson's manuscript illustrations depict a very different Alice from the girl of his photographs, the text still acknowledges the audience of one: the muse to whom the poems even in the final print publications would clearly reference. Already, Alice's adventures are a participatory text, for none of us can know what role Alice Liddell had in shaping the adventures Carroll would commit to paper. The ephemeral Alice of the legendary "golden afternoon" cannot be known, nor can Alice be found in the conversations that may or may not have taken place along the river.

The unknowablity of the oral text precedes and echoes the unknowability of Alice, forever changing before our eyes, as we remediate Alice.