What’s it like to be a chess piece?
Through the looking-glass menagerie
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass is a story within a story.
In the opening pages, Carroll presents the reader with a set of chess moves that govern the book’s narrative. In eleven turns, we learn where Alice is going, who she meets, and how she wins the day.
Carroll’s characters are chess pieces with personalities to match: ineffectual kings, powerful queens, awkward knights, peripheral castles, and guileless pawns. When Alice makes it to the end of the board she becomes a queen, much to the chagrin of a monarchy staring down the barrel of regime change.
At the climax of the story the Red Queen transforms into Alice’s cat as our heroine returns to the real world. On the other side, Alice wants answers from her feline companion about what, if anything, she knows about the world of the looking-glass.
“It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. “If they would only purr for ‘yes’ and mew for ‘no,’ or any rule of that sort,” she had said, “so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?” On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible to guess whether it meant “yes” or “no.”
Much like its precursor, Through the Looking-Glass is a book about the logic of communication. Alice muddles her way through one baffling encounter after another. Chess brings the grammar, but it’s still not enough to figure out what the residents of the looking-glass realm actually want.
We know how these pieces relate to each other, and even how the plot is going to unfold, but every interaction between Alice and the characters leaves us more confused than the last.
When she returns to the real world, Carroll wraps things up with a conversation between the protagonist and her cat. At both the beginning and end of the book, our author goes out of his way to describe the relationship between Alice and the kitten.
She talks to it, she scolds it, she anthropomorphises it. She loves the cat dearly, but laments that satisfying communication is impossible.
Alice can project meaning onto the cat's purring, just as chess gives us the scaffolding to make sense of the looking-glass characters, but she can never truly know if she's got the right end of the stick.
This idea is the core of the book. Chess is a clever structural device that determines the action, but its also an organising principle. It’s a metaphor for communication across difference, one that provides a shared system for meaning-making in a world resistant to logic.
Chess is a vehicle for interactions between agents with no shared beliefs, no emotional intimacy, and no common reference points. Alice doesn’t just play her way through the world of the looking-glass; she lives inside a rule-based system where we know the moves but not their meanings.
Through the Looking-Glass reminds us that we make our rules and we live by them, but all the structure in the world doesn’t tell us about what it’s like to be cat or how to navigate the internal logic of a board game.
Carroll gives us a world governed by logic and full of confusion. He gives us the purring cat to point out that even the most relatable structures are not necessarily a source of understanding.
In this sense the book prefigures the famous phrase from the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘if a lion could speak, we could not understand him’. What Wittgenstein meant was that language is entangled with shared logics, contexts, and ways of being in the world.
A speaking lion is still a lion, a being with radically different experiences, priorities, and sensory perceptions to us. Even if a lion could produce human words, Wittgenstein says, the meaning behind those words would be rooted in lion experiences that we wouldn’t understand.
Assuming Alice’s cat could speak English (as the Cheshire Cat does in the dream), its mode of being still makes true understanding elusive. Its language would emerge from an expression of life that we would find alien.
Carroll intuits this problem throughout the dreamworld, where despite having a common language, Alice and the chess-piece characters repeatedly talk past each other.
They speak and listen, but they don’t understand.
Hidden depths
If Wittgenstein thought lions were simply too different to grasp, then dolphins would surely have been a non-starter. They inhabit a world where sound travels differently, where they make sense of their environment by bouncing sound through water.
Nonetheless, researchers at Google are giving a dialogue with dolphins a shot. Rather than assuming they can directly translate dolphin communication into human language, the group sought to identify patterns within the dolphins' own communication system.
They began by connecting behaviours to vocalisations, a project that marine biologists have been engaged in for decades. The approach was simple enough. Each time a dolphin performs an action and makes a noise, that particular vocalisation is dropped into a catalogue alongside the corresponding action.
Based on this information, the group created a simplified communication system around specific objects. When a dolphin makes a noise, specially developed headphones tell a handler which object it corresponds to.
Some people take this to mean that Wittgenstein was wrong, that it is in fact possible to walk and talk (and swim) with the animals. But this work seems to support the idea that without shared contexts, words (or in this case, sounds) lose their meaning.
In many ways the project is Wittgensteinian. It acknowledges that full understanding may be impossible, but limited communication around shared physical experiences might be achievable.
And lets say that we can successfully identify patterns that suggest language-like structure in dolphin communication, and use those to create a shared vocabulary around certain objects. Even if we’re successful, our interpretation of these patterns will inevitably be filtered through our own sense of being.
So Wittgenstein wins the day, right?
If we say that true ‘understanding’ must be predicated on shared frames of reference, then of course it is impossible to enjoy meaningful communications with non-humans.
But that’s not particularly satisfying because it precludes the idea that there are any vectors for meaning-making outside of mutually held conceptions about what it is like to be a certain type of thing or exist in a particular way.
The chess structure in Through the Looking-Glass creates a system that generates meaning, even if that meaning is unconventional. The chess moves aren't so much mimicking a story as producing one through their own internal logic.
A form of communication is taking place when Alice interacts with her cat, though limited and asymmetrical. The cat is responding to Alice in ways that carry real significance within the context of their shared relationship. It may not answer her questions, but the relationship itself becomes its own language that both parties can make sense of in their way.
Being able to connect certain dolphin sounds to objects is not complete understanding, but it does suggest that communicative overlap is possible. The solubility of the problem is curious, but we ought to remember we have no way to verify whether our interpretations of dolphin communication are ‘correct’ in the sense dolphins would recognise.
While we can't access ‘dolphiness,’ we do share a physical world with dolphins. Specific objects like seagrass or scarves create points of overlap between our perceptual worlds, which become sites around which meaning-making becomes possible.
What’s it like to be a chess piece?
The philosopher Thomas Nagel posed this problem in his famous essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? He argued that even a complete account of a creature’s behaviour and brain function wouldn’t get us any closer to knowing what its experience is like.
We might know how the bat functions, but not how the bat feels. The subjective character of experience, what philosophers call qualia, can’t be rendered as information.
When I read Through the Looking-Glass I thought of Nagel’s bat. From the outside, the chessboard logic of Carroll’s story is perfectly legible to us as readers. We can trace the moves, follow the rules, and understand the mechanics.
The book is on one level pure structure: eleven chess moves laid out in advance, with every action taking us closer to checkmate. The world is meant to be transparent, but becomes gradually more opaque as time passes.
From the outside, the system makes sense. But from within, it doesn’t. Characters speak in riddles, behave according to private codes, treat the absurd as normal and clarity as foreign.
Logic is shared, but meaning is not. Like deep ocean or lightless cave, the world of the looking-glass only works if you’re built for it. We can know the rules without knowing what it’s like to live by them. Systems create form without necessarily creating sense.
But maybe they don’t need to.
My problem with Wittgenstein’s lion is that on some level we already understand animals without needing to hear them speak. We talk to cats and play fetch with dolphins.
We act as if understanding is possible because the alternative is silence. This is why Carroll begins and ends the book with the cat: to tell us that meaning is what we make of it.
Significance isn’t always found in the logic of the system, the rules and codes that govern reality. The chessboard is a story that the pieces can’t read. The cat doesn’t know Alices thinks she joined her in the dreamworld.
Yet communication persists and meaning is possible. A purr might not mean yes or no, but it does mean something.