The Sandman(Blog #2)

While reading The Sandman by Eta Hoffman, I can now officially say that I will never look at the folklore the same way. Hoffman does a spectacular job at putting the reader on edge when we cant decide if the events taking place are actually psychological or supernatural occurrences. The story was interesting in that it was written in letter format which consisted of three letters from Nathaniel, Klara, and Lothar. As a child, Nathaniel's mother would always put him and his siblings to sleep at a specific time and would say that the sandman is coming. Out of curiosity, Nathaniel asks his mother who this nasty Sandman was and she she simply states that he does not exist. Not satisfied, he finally asks his sister's caretaker to describe the Sandman. He was depicted as a "wicked man who threw sand into children's eyes until they bled and popped out of their heads when they refused to go to bed. He would take their eyeballs and put them in a sack and bring them to the moon to feed his owl beaked children." Terrified for his life, Nathaniel's terror increased even more when he insisted that his father's friend Coppelius was indeed the evil sandman. As the reader goes further in the story, Nathaniel's anxiety comes back when he believes that the barometer seller, Coppola, at university is Coppelius in disguise. As much as we'd like to believe, there is no certain line for where we can draw if Nathaniel is going insane of if he's being really haunted. However this is something to expect when reading a good Gothic story. The Sandman is also clear in the Romantic genre when we observe Nathaniel, Klara, and Lothar's letters. There is a discussion of rational or logical thinking versus the belief in dark, crazy, imaginings. I highly regarded this story as eery and definitely spine chilling.