A day before I had read this in The Story of Alice:
[T]he longer Alice spends underground the more her adventures start to resemble a narrative game of Doublets, in which the aim is to take 'Alice' and ensure that by the end of her story she is 'Alive'.
Doublets was a word game Carroll invented, in which the challenge is to transform one word into another by changing one letter at a time, with each intermediate step also being a word. (I used to play a very similar game as a child, the challenge typically being to get from sick to smug while passing through certain specified intermediate words on the way.)
"Help I'm . . ." makes me think of this old Calvin & Hobbes strip:
A child being shrunk down to a minuscule size takes us right back to Alice.
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