Lewis Carroll's use of puns and riddles in Alice in Wonderland helps set the theme and tone. He uses puns in the book to show a world of distorted reality and mass confusion. He uses such puns to reveal the underlying theme of "growing up", but with such an unusual setting and ridiculous characters, in-depth analysis is required to show this theme. The book contains many examples of assonance and alliteration to add humor. Carroll also adds strange diction and extraordinary syntax to support the theme. The main character, Alice, is a young girl around her pre-teens. In the real world, adult characters still look down on her because of her utter nonsense. She is seen as the average, everyday immature child, but when she is placed in the world of "Wonderland", the roles seem to change. The adult characters in Wonderland are full of absurdities and Alice is now the mature one. Thus creating the theme of “growing up”. “...Alice, like all other little girls, is herself inevitably progressing toward adulthood” (Heydt 62). Alice now faces the responsibility of adulthood. Wonderland is only the initiation between childhood and upcoming maturity. Throughout the book, Alice constantly changes size to fit the distorted spaces of Wonderland. She often gets frustrated when she doesn't have the right size she wants. Alice seems to be going through puberty because "it was much nicer at home, when we weren't always getting bigger and smaller", she is unhappy with the size of her body (Carroll 49). This frustration often occurs through the process of “growing up.” Characters in the book often speak with puns and strange diction, usually confusing the person to whom the middle of paper ......tale. One of the main goals of writing Alice in Wonderland was not only to show the difficulties of communication between children and adults. In this story, almost every adult Alice spoke to didn't understand her. Sometimes she completely ruined what they were saying, which often stays true to real-life circumstances. This book shows that children and adults are on completely separate pages of an eternal story. Carroll points out that sometimes children, like Alice, have difficulty managing the transition from childhood to adulthood, "growing up." Alice in Wonderland is just a complicated way of showing this fact. Lewis Carroll's way of using words is confusing, entertaining, serious, and very unique. And it's safe to say that it would be difficult to replicate such an imaginative technique one day (Long 72).