Chess structures the plot of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.
Alice’s journey unfolds as a giant chess game. She begins as a pawn and travels across a landscape arranged like a chessboard, moving from one square to another until she reaches the far side and becomes a queen. The characters she meets correspond broadly to chess pieces, including the Red Queen, the White Queen, and the kings.
Carroll even included a chess problem at the beginning of the book and supplied notes explaining how the narrative relates to the game. The story does not always follow standard chess rules perfectly, but the chess framework gives the apparently disconnected episodes an underlying structure.
This differs from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is organized more like a sequence of encounters after Alice falls down the rabbit hole. Through the Looking-Glass instead uses chess, mirrors, reversals, and promotion to explore movement, identity, rules, and the strange logic of the looking-glass world.