Interestingly, I never really got this sense when reading the book. The characters seemed part of the tea party, like moving parts of a larger machine. It's really only when I was watching Burton's movie did I think, "Whoa, this is a lot like Sartre's No Exit."

Supposedly, the whole point of the Alice books was to demonstrate the absurdity of new mathematics. Can't really point to specifics with the tea party scene, but parts with the Griffin and the Mock Turtle (you know, the characters that no one ever bothers to include in their adaptations for stupid reasons) definitely have that going on.