Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man"

But the heart of black letter horror in "The Sand-Man" is filtered through Nathanael's perceptions. Pathological fantasy achieves attitude as reality until Nathanael is exposed as an unreliable cashier and his perceptions as symptomatic of his pathology.

The story begins as an epistolary narrative, with Nathanael recalling his first childhood experience of the Sandman as the mysterious late-night caller, Dr. Coppelius, who visited his father with well-nigh regularity aft(prenominal) the children had been put to bed and whose physical ugliness, ane comes to understand, was against him. "Here comes the Sand-man," Nathanael's mother would say, referring to the children's bed time. However, in Nathanael's mind that acknowledgement became fused with the largely invisible visitor, particularly when Nathanael stole a look at the gentleman caller and was frightened by his grotesque appearance. Nathanael is no less frightened when, years later, he again encounters the apparition and becomes obsessed with Coppelius's activity.

The fear has tenuous community to fact. Nathanael's father was indebted to a lawyer named Coppelius, who was dishonest and physically repulsive that (like Nathanael's father) an alchemist-inventor. Coppelius used to visit Nathanael's father because the both men worked on a project together, always after the children had been put to bed. Nathanael is obsessed with

Nathanael rejects Clara, sightly more obsessed with Olimpia, a young woman (as he describes her) of perfect beauty and manner, supposedly the daughter of Professor Spalanzani, a partner of Coppola. When it is revealed that Olimpia is in reality an automaton, Nathanael again comes back to his senses and to Clara. They ar on the point of marriage when Nathanael sees old Coppelius in a crowd and goes into another frenzy, n primal sidesplitting Clara but killing himself instead.

In "The Sand-Man," the limits of perception argon manifest by the move psychology of the hero and the magic of mechanical wizardry, which in the early nineteenth century, the time of the Industrial Revolution, would have been something like witchcraft or alchemy.

This confluence of elements extends beyond the text of the words into the terra firma of a pathological sentience experienced by Nathanael as Romanticism but transmuted for the reader into psychological horror. As Nathanael sees the world, a "terrible thing" has entered his life, and he feels the threat of some " marvellous fate" (Hoffmann 183). As he tells his story, the reader begins to suspect that Nathanael's perceptions are themselves suspect and that he is an unreliable narrator. Hoffmann's narrative strategy of video is to present a fibrelity, at least in the epistolary segments of the story, through that personality's eyes, in order to demonstrate for the reader the immediate apprehension of Nathanael's deeply flawed vision.

Nathanael continually returns to an obsession that Coppelius's evil persona has entered him and is turning him into a demon. This turns out to be true, but not for the reasons Nathanael thinks. For it is Nathanael who becomes obsessed with the evil persona and takes it into himself, carrying out Clara's prediction: "Yes, Nathanael. You are right; Coppelius is an Evil Principle; he can do dreadful things, as bad as could a mephistophelean power which should assume a living physical form, but only--only if you do not banish
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