Lewis Carroll

The Snark is a poem about being and non-being, an existential poem, a poem of existential agony. The Bellman's map is the map that charts the course of humanity; blank because we posses no information about where we are or whither we drift. The ship's bowsprit gets mixed with its rudder and when we think we sail west east. The Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death. It is the end of all searching. It is final, absolute extinction. In a literal sense, Caroll's Boojum means nothing at all. It is the void, the great blank emptiness out of which we miraculously emerged; by which we will ultimately be devouted; through which the absurd galaxies spiral and drift endlessly on their nonsense voyages from nowhere to nowhere.