Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over. Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it.

Episodic dream-wandering still accumulates toward the absurd trial and waking collapse; loose surface, closed arc, so plot scores 91.

"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); "now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!"

Alice's logic-and-proportion resistance anchors the nonsense; each creature has a verbal tic, but Alice carries the cast dimension, so cast scores 90.

There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, "Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!" She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen.

Short chapters swap scenes with almost no stall; momentum is the default mode, so pace scores 96.

once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice "without pictures or conversations?"

Pun, paradox, and nursery rhythm are fused in lines that read aloud like verse; prose craft is the book's primary engine, so prose scores 98.

"Silence!" and read out from his book, "Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court." Everybody looked at Alice. "I'm not a mile high," said Alice.

Wonderland rules mutate every scene yet obey an internal bureaucratic logic; the world stays absurd but consistent, so world scores 97.

when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!"

White Rabbit, watch, and rabbit hole complete the summons within pages; one of English fantasy's sharpest opens, so hook scores 99.

Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains!

Nonsense fiction gains a decisive English template here—logic games plus dream geography—so innov scores 99.

"Why, they're only a pack of cards, after all. I needn't be afraid of them!" … till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:— First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee.

The pack-of-cards snap ends the dream while the sister's reverie softens the landing; closure is abrupt yet tender, so ending scores 91.