I remember reading Sophie’s World my senior year of high school. Actually, I remember reading it in 6th grade, except that time I skipped all the philosophical mumbo-jumbo in order to find out what happened to Sophie and whether she was real or not. The question of what is real, how we define “reality,” has always interested me. From when I first began reading, I was always drawn to stories about magic, alternate universes, dreams. Peter Pan used to make me cry because he was able to take his wish and turn it into his reality, and I was not.
As fascinating as the history of philosophy was in Sophie’s World, to this day her story is still what draws me back to the book, because her story is intrinsically tied to the basic human questions of, “Who am I?”, “Where did I come from?” and “Where am I going?” She discovers she is not real, that she came from the mind of a writer, and that she can only continue to exist as the shadow of an idea in the “real” world, which, to us, is not the real world at all, because we are reading about her “book existence” in a book.
This same question, or set of questions, is asked first in the literature and then in the various film adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, and echoed in movies like The Matrix and Dark City. In the former, Neo is told to “follow the white rabbit” (a direct reference to “Alice ”), and when he does, his entire reality, which had always discontented him, implodes. In the latter, John is told that he is special, he is different, and the world as he knows it is not as it seems, and only he can change things.
Whether it is intentional or not, all three of these characters—Alice, Neo, and John—are running away from unacceptable realities. John cannot believe he is a murderer, Neo (to steal a phrase from Beauty and the Beast) knows “there must be more than this provincial [unfulfilling] life,” and Alice (at least in one version of the story) must run away from an unhappily-arranged marriage. They all cannot believe that what they perceive is what is right[1], and so they go in search of the truth—falling down a rabbit hole, drinking a red pill, hacking through a brick wall into the abyss of space. They are driven by a need not only to find out what the true “reality” is, but what their role in that reality is intended to be. In Wonderland, Alice must best the Red Queen. In Zion , Neo must best the machines. In the Dark City
Once they have beaten their various enemies, reality is set in stone and they can continue to exist in relative peace. Alice returns to her normal life above-ground, Neo dies a martyr’s death in exchange for his people’s continued existence, and John fashions his world to the beautiful whims of implanted childhood memories. After coming through the rabbit hole, so to speak, they are fulfilled in a way they have never known before, simply because they know the truth, and the knowing gives them a place to start from, a place to begin to define themselves in order to move forward.
These stories, while set in extremely different settings (a fantastic underground Wonderland, a post-apocalyptic earth, a floating space-city), spring from the same quest for identity, and are therefore applicable to almost anyone from any age or culture. The success of such stories stems from their philosophical roots, because whether we are aware of it or not, all humans are scholars, constantly searching out the answers to the questions of our individual and collective identities.
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