Change, change, change: Sandman and the ’90s
by grandhotelabyss
[2011 Preface: This post garnered a fair amount of attention when Gaiman himself linked it. It was written in 2008 in response to a debate happening in the literary blogosphere about novels that typified either the 1990s or 2000s. I’ve deleted my prefatory linking, which was excessively punchy in its commentary on the material linked, and I’ve also revised the prose for clarity. I stand by most of it, though I am far less interested now in using works of art to make historical or political diagnoses. This was written at the tail end of my interest in Marxist criticism, and all it needs to be an example of such criticism is an explicit discussion of how Sandman reflects the contradictions of the lower middle class that largely produced and consumed it in the context of late twentieth-century capitalist retrenchment. As I said, I’m no longer sure of the value of such interpretations.]
One will quickly go astray if one looks for evidence of ’90s or ’00s fictionalization just in material that takes the headlines on directly. Case in point: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which in 2008 had its twenty-year anniversary. Not a word was mentioned in Sandman about the Clinton scandals, the Contract with America, the Rwandan genocide, the siege of Sarajevo, the dot-com bubble, the rise of the militias, the expansion of the internet or the End of History, and yet it’s difficult to imagine a piece of fiction which more clearly enters a number of conversations about ethics and aesthetics that were going on in the ’90s.
(For a plot summary of Sandman, see Wikipedia.)
I had a very typical reading experience with the book: I read it in collections in the mid ’90s; I began reading with Dream Country when I was 12 or 13, and I was 15 when the final collection, The Wake, came out. All through high school, I loaned the books out to people, mostly women. In her interview in Rain Taxi, Sandman‘s editor, Karen Berger, stated that she was most proud of the fact that the series had become a literary rite of passage, something that teenagers read, a millenial Catcher in the Rye or Slaughterhouse-Five. Sandman certainly worked that way for me, and, as one of the most allusive teenage rite of passage books, it sent me directly out of comics and sf/fantasy to Homer, Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, Joyce and Faulkner.
Recently, however, I sequentially re-read the series, in my old trade paperbacks with the original Dave McKean covers, each a depiction of a face. I only made it through Brief Lives, but I was struck first of all by the coherence of what had initially seemed to be a meandering series, and also by the thematic cohesiveness. Honestly, the book could never mean as much emotionally as it did when I was 15, but I had no idea how richly it repaid a reading at the age of 26 (close to Gaiman’s age, after all, when he began writing it). What seemed to have been an elaborate allegory about the emotional weather of high school actually turns out to concern the decisions one makes about how to be an adult, and the options Gaiman presents have a distinctly ’90s inflection: it may be Gen-Y’s gateway drug to high literature, but it’s every inch a Gen-X book, a compendium of slacker lassitude, dot-com ambition, Starbucks ennui and battle-of-Seattle fury.
Sandman asks these ethical and political questions: Is it better to accept that the world is the way it is and that its constant awful tumult will never cease? If so, should you then do your work to the best of your ability? Or drop out and do your own thing on the fringes? On the other hand, should you refuse to accept the reality principle and hew to ethical absolutes with the purpose of making the world better than it is? Other options besides these are presented, of course, including the enactment of absolute evil (The Corinthian), self-enslavement to addictive forms of fantasy (Barbie, Rachel), etc., but the two choices above seem to be the ethical foci around which the ellipse of the text turns.
I take Death to represent the it-is-what-it-is-and-get-on-with-your-work position; her motto might be Wallace Stevens’s line, “The imperfect is our paradise.” She stands for personal responsibility, the local amelioration of suffering, the value of being-here-now. She is genuinely kind, which goes a long way toward explaining the popularity of a character who so represents the ethos of the service industry. Ray Mescallado long ago noticed that she was cute, but not exactly sexy: this is because outright sexiness would introduce passions that her prudent, pragmatic, sarcastic character negates.
Destruction is similar to Death in his common sense and his insistence that each individual take responsibility for him- or herself. His mode of responsibility,though, is not the practical performance of necessary tasks in an imperfect world, but rather disengagement from a world he knows to be unjust. A more romantic figure, he stands for a kind of anarchism, but he’s an aesthete and an independent craftsman, a burly localvore dropout rather than any kind of brick-thrower.
Both of these characters, as well as some others (Rose Walker, Hazel and Foxglove, Hob Gadling, Lucifer, Matthew, Emperor Norton, Ben Jonson, etc.), stand for what came in the popular mind to be called postmodernism. They have no ethical or metaphysical universals to which they would submit the world, because they know the world’s watchword is “change” and that it’s no use trying to step in the same river twice. That’s why Death “sees everybody,” as she always tells us, and we presume that she finds it futile to judge any of them except on the scale of their own ability to accept the world’s impermanence.
Dream, on the other hand (and not only Dream but also Orpheus, Delirium, Lyta, Remiel, Duma, Haroun al-Rashid, Robespierre, and Wanda), cannot go with the flow. To the postmodernists they reply that some things are too important simply to accept as impermanent, and that our lives may be brief but that for them to be worthy they must hang on a strong nail of meaning. Dreams’s duty, Delirium’s openness to all experience, Orpheus’s sorrow, Remiel and Duma’s God, Haroun al-Rashid’s Baghdad, Robespierre’s revolution, Wanda’s female gender, cannot be cast blithely on the flowing waters. Identity is what we refuse to give up; I can only change so much before I am no longer me. And if I go to work at a job I hate, I cannot be me; but also if I quit the job that I hate I cannot just decamp to the country with my dog and paint pictures, because the world that creates such jobs is broken or out of control. The world must be fixed, in both senses.
I gather teenagers love this book because they have just had their hearts broken by their first love or they have just fought with their parents about their futures. These first experiences of adult loss and adult conflict, which they cannot just bounce back from, puts them in the camp of the absolutists, insisting on the primacy of their own ethical and emotional directives. But then they find those perfect friends, Death and Destruction, to talk them down, to tell them that there are other fish in the sea and that college won’t be so bad and that, after all, you only get a lifetime and so you might as well make the best of it rather than moping around in the rain. The book is cheering to the heartbroken 16-year-old because it delivers the lesson you need to hear at that age: it’s compromise or suicide, and compromise is more fun.
Sandman is a different book at 26, however, because you’ve made all your compromises, you’re beginning to rethink all your compromises, and suddenly Death and Destruction’s encouraging voices no longer sound so friendly. Dream’s resolution unto death (or Death) begins to seem more appealing.
Note Gaiman’s intellectual honesty here: the valorization of change for its own sake is ultimately the valorization of death and destruction. Hence, what prompts Destruction to quit his post is the invention of scientific ideology in the Enlightenment, that intellectual movement which will spread the pro-change mantra, in capitalist and communist forms, to the four corners of the globe. Sandman‘s earth-toned color palette, its air of wooden furniture, green-glass wine bottles and old libraries indexes what change and death and destruction are taking away from us; it reminds us, at the End of History, that “progress” comes at a great price.
From another perspective, Destruction’s retreat is reactive and self-serving, a personal lifestyle politics that doesn’t attempt to intervene in the world it finds so oppressive. Dream, for one, rejects the postmodern insistence on impermanence, hybridity, pragmatism and openness; he cleaves to his ethical absolutes and to his duty. What happens? All of the bad things that postmodernists warn us about: not to put too fine a point on it, Dream oppresses women, and, in the worst case, he robs a black woman of her freedom. He reminds us that western empire is not just change, but also a plan to put the world under one rule, and when Nada will not agree to live in his world he consigns her to hell. The absolute and the unyielding exact a toll, just as change and the acceptance of impermanence does.
The book never really chooses sides, but exhibits admirable negative capability. It’s up to us to decide how we wish to act in this most imperfect world; Sandman does not answer our ethical questions, nor should it, but it asks them with great wit and intensity.
What makes it a superb work of art is the fact that the ethical quandary expresses itself at the formal level. Generically, Sandman is a taut Shakespearean tragedy attenuated within a cantering, leisurely magic-realist novel: imagine Macbeth pieced out like breadcrumbs through a Rushdie tale. In other words, the two forms, the premodern one made to describe the unyielding soul’s crushing encounter with fate, and the postmodern one that embodies multiple perspectives, colliding communities, and meaningless but celebratory metamorphoses, coexist uneasily, as the text’s two worldviews jostle each other. It’s as if Gaiman, realizing the triumph of the postmodern, the reign of change and of acceptance-of-death, wanted to write one last tragedy. That is a greater ambition than most other writers showed in the same period and, strange as it seems, Gaiman managed to get that period into a work which looks like it’s about every time and no time; and, if I may venture a severe and absolute judgment, that makes it a book for all time.
Grand Hotel Abyss 
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Beautifully put, every word. Wow.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Neil’s linked to this post. Which is, as he says, very interesting. Nicely done.
You should really read Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s, as you say, life changing. I only wish I read it in High School instead of college.
What you say about the post-modern strikes me as very interesting, especially since you do mention S-5. I’m somewhat obsessed with the big V and I don’t really think Slaughterhouse is necessarily his best piece, but it does best exemplify what you read into Death and Destruction here, which is the acceptance. I hope I’m not spoiling too much when I tell you that Slaughterhouse Five is about a man who has come unstuck in time. He flashes back and forth all over the place, and it’s all quite real to him, but of course his family think he’s quite simply insane. The refrain, if you will, is “So it goes”, which Kurt says whenever someone dies or mortality generally is referenced, but it’s also the general mindset the alien culture who lives in four dimensions “teach” our protagonist: it all happened, it is all happening, it will all happen, all at once, and so it goes. Nothing much you can do about it but get on with it.
I was 18, actually, when I first read Sandman, and I know that no one will believe me, but my love for the book was a rational love of reason, a love for the craft, and most importantly a love affair with the story itself. There wasn’t much in the subject matter that connected with me–not yet, at any rate. I was freshly in love, had my first meaningful relationship (she introduced me to the comic, no less) and I just couldn’t believe that there was such a wealth of story out there. I was upset when I read The Sound of Her Wings, because it could not have been more diagonally opposite to my point of view. I was angry that Gaiman would say this, that Death is the Good Friend who comes and sets you free, but of course neither was it Gaiman who said any of that, nor was that the message really. At any rate, I loved it for the stories.
Then, of course, I had my heart broken, again and again, and with each time I did the stories got a little better. Now that I’m 28, a good 10 years after first reading the books (has it really been that long?) I get a lot of the things you’re saying, as well.
I don’t think that the question of whether or not a particular book or set of stories is True Literature is particularly interesting or meaningful, but my opinion vis-a-vis the art question changes frequently. Let’s just say that if I had to come up with a Litmus test then one of the best candidates would be just this: how often can you come back, how many new things can you see, how many Yous can find something deep and beautiful and true in the piece? The higher that number, the more likely that we should call the piece in question Art (and lock it away, of course, lest lesser minds be hurt by it).
Hm. I usually try and end my rambling comments with some sort of sentence that implies a theme to the whole rant, a punchline, but I can’t come up with one now. So let’s just say what you said was important and true to me on some level that forced me to comment back. Thank you :)
I suspect that you don’t like Hemingway. Nor do you like his writing style. Nor do you share in his mistrust of writers who use ‘ten dollar words’ to convey Big emotions and Big thoughts when there are ‘older and simpler and better words’ that can do the same job.
You wrote a very intelligent essay that discussed a number of topics well and to a great depth. You just didn’t write something engaging to read. (And come on, structural rhythms aside, who uses ‘valorization’ twice in one sentence?)
Leon: You’re incorrect, it was quite engaging.
Older, simpler, better words are not necessarily any of those things. Language changes for a reason. Valorization is a good word, you’re just fulfilling the myth that all writing, at all times, needs to be for the lowest common denominator.
It’s cool to use Ten Dollar Words, because some topics deserve the level of respect implied in their use.
[…] I just stumbled into an excellent critique of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Sandman’, here at Grand Hotel Abyss. My soft spot for teh Sandman stories is pretty well catalogued, but I found a whole bundle of […]
I followed the link from Neil’s blog, and I’m glad I did. Excellent piece, and very thought-provoking. For all that Leon, above, seems to think you used overly-complex language, to me (a neophyte at Literary Criticism(tm)) you actually shed a little light on concepts that I didn’t really understand. So, thanks for that.
~ John
Hi everybody; thanks for commenting, and for your very kind words, Josh, Tom, Genghis and John.
Leon: Actually, I do like Hemingway; he wrote one of my favorite short stories ever (“In Another Country”) and one indispensible novel (The Sun Also Rises). I’m a literary pluralist, so I think that sometimes the simplest language is what’s wanted, and sometimes it ain’t. The literary work under discussion above, Sandman, certainly never shied away from the ten-dollar word.
Uthor: I know, I will read it someday, I swear!
Daniel: Thank you, and don’t worry about rambling, it’s usually more fun to read that somebody trying to hammer a point home. Our teenage responses to Sandman were interestingly different; like I said, I needed to hear the acceptance lesson at that point. And on the style level, I had been reading a lot of Alan Moore, who always impressed me with his overt level of craft but who made me feel like I had to do the same sort of thing in my own writing, and Sandman felt more relaxed, more subtle–the craft is all there, but it’s moving more slowly and lets you wander around in it.
I agree with about True Literature; that’s just a social category, a status marker. But what you say about how many re-readings a book can stand up to I think is the definite marker of good literature.
My experience was a bit different, being in my young 20s already in the mid 90s for that first reading in a mixture of singles and collections. But it was a formative reading all the same and I agree that Dream’s pig headed view was probably most appealing at that time. But I can also add to your wonderful analysis that, in my experience, the re-reading in your 30s may bring a new light to Death’s and Destruction’s views that show them to be at their core not so different, really. Thank you for all the beautiful insight and a reminder of why this story matters so much to me.
[…] Change, change, change: Sandman and the ’90s « Grand Hotel Abyss Sandman asks this ethical and political question: Is it better to accept that the world is the way it is and its constant awful tumult will never change, and thus either do your work to the best of your ability or drop out and do your own thing on the fringes; or should you refuse to accept the reality principle and hew to ethical absolutes with the purpose of making the world better than it is? Other options besides these are presented, of course, including the enactment of absolute evil (The Corinthian), the self-enslavement to addictive forms of fantasy (Barbie, Rachel), etc., but the two choices above seem to be the two ethical foci around which the ellipse of the text turns. […]
The first Sandman comic I bought was #8 in 1990 or so, and it was the McKean cover that grabbed me. I scrambled to track down the rest of the series and ended up following through the next several years until Gaiman finished it. I was around 19 when I discovered it and it remains one of my favorite literary discoveries twenty years later-the only thing I can compare it to is one of Dickens’ great works. Thanks for this, it was an interesting analysis.
-WD
[…] Change, change, change: Sandman and the ’90s Fiction and History is the topic of the hour: the dire Benjamin Kunkel (not as dire as his buddy Gessen, I admit) […] […]
I absolutely love the Sandman series. I got to read it in college until the first year I started working–that time when I didn’t know what to do with my life. The series is truly inspirational, and although it didn’t directly answer my questions about what to do with life, it’s an amazing piece of work that inspired me to think about what’s really important to myself.
“Identity is what we refuse to give up; I can only change so much before I am no longer me. And if I go to work at a job I hate, I cannot be me; but also if I quit the job that I hate I cannot just decamp to the country with my dog and paint pictures, I must still engage with the world on my terms.” –How true.
I’ll probably read the series again this Christmas break. Good job with this post.
To Genghis Philip and the author; that’s a fair and accurate response. Perhaps my own literary insecurities showed through…
For a long time I have not read something in this quality on Neil Gaiman’s work. Although I don’t accept everything that is said here I admit some of the ideas are quite well put into words.
Good work,
Congrats.
for slaughterhouse 5: its a good book but not a life changing experience for me.
Your point about the absolute and unyielding exacting a toll is supportable enough, but this leaves me scratching my head:
All of the bad things that postmodernists warn us about: not to put too fine a point on it, Dream oppresses women, and, in the worst case, he enslaves a woman of color.
Is not part of the point that Morpheus is pretty much an equal-opportunity offender? Women, men, gods, his own family — Morpheus is unyielding to everybody he encounters, and all pay a price for it. This seems like a gratuitous observation at best, and the bit about “enslaving a woman of color” is particularly weak given that he appears to Nada as one of her own. As the story is written and depicted, I don’t see how your “western empire” point holds up as being relevant.
I first encountered Sandman in TPB form in 1997 at roughly age 21. I’ve read it again at least a couple of times since then, including reading it aloud to my wife — surprising her to no end that she would be capable of crying at the end of a “comic book.” Since I didn’t read it as a teenager I have no idea what it’s like from that point of view, but as you say, it is interesting what age and changing perspective reveals about the various facets of the story.
Richard
Sorry — what age and changing perspective reveal… subject, meet verb. I hope you agree.
Thanks, fb, lisallanto, Violet and Leon and Rahim!
Richard: You’re quite right about the facts of the story, but in the kind of sociological approach I’m going for here–which is of course not the only way to approach art–I’m interested in how elements of the story interact with the expections of the story’s typical audience or with the discourses of its time.
So the average Sandman reader is probably somewhere between 12 and 42, middle-class and educated; this reader either is familiar with or is about to become familiar with what I’ve outlined as postmodernism above and so he or she knows that one of its reasons for distrusting claims about Truth, ethical absolutes etc. is because these claims have been used by European and American authorities to oppress non-whites and by men to oppress women. Since Dream and Death are the protagonists, and since they’re presented to that reader as “types” with which the reader will be familiar, the reader tends to identify with them or at least read them as being one of “us.” At least I think that’s what I did and what I see happening in other people’s responses. So when Dream takes away the freedom of a woman of color, back before he became a different person, I don’t think it’s a stretch to connect that to the ideas about politics that were circulating at the time, even if it makes a different kind of sense in the fantasy world of the story.
I grant that this is bascially the Marxist theory of how to read literature, and it can be used in the dullest, most soul-crushing ways–and I hope I didn’t do that above.
As for whether Dream abuses women more than men…I would have to take a second look. but it seems like all the men he treats poorly, even to some extent Orpheus, had it coming at least a little bit, while Calliope and Nada did nothing to merit his treatment of them and he could have avoided a lot of problems had he only behaved more decently toward people like Rose and Lyta. Hence, the female revenge taken on him at the end.
I grant that this is bascially the Marxist theory of how to read literature, and it can be used in the dullest, most soul-crushing ways–and I hope I didn’t do that above.
No, I just don’t agree with it, and the way you articulate this particular point remains something to which I find myself unable to relate. Given that we’re consistently shown Morpheus as appearing in a form to which the mortals perceiving him can relate to (as a cat, as an African, etc.) — that is, so that he is not perceived as an “other,” exactly — I find that, in taking the story on the terms in which it is presented, I can’t see your point without reading something into it that isn’t already there and/or rather straining credulity. That said, it’s equally clear that isn’t what you think you’re doing, so I’m doing my best to take your point on its own terms as well.
What I would suggest is that your use of highly charged language such as “oppressing women” and “enslaving a woman of color” serves to obscure, rather than clarify, your point to somebody reading it from my perspective. I don’t think Gaiman is making the political point that kind of language implies, not by a long shot. (Which is not to say I don’t think he’s making any political points in Sandman; just not those particular points in that particular manner.) I could potentially even go along with “Morpheus tends to mistreat the people around him, particularly the women,” but “oppressing women” seems to speak to an intention on Morpheus’ part which we’re never shown, at least that I can think of. “Enslaving a woman of color”? Banishment, condemnation, imprisonment, maybe. Again, to me this seems a reach to make a political point that I have trouble seeing in the story as presented. Nada’s race functions as a way to demonstrate Morpheus’ transcendence of time, geography, and nationality, but in contrast to, say, Wanda, whose sexuality is most certainly a plot point and a defining characteristic, I don’t see how Nada works out to be “the oppressed black woman”.
I’ll be the first person to admit that literature is not my field, however, so to the extent that I’m having trouble seeing how you’re getting from A to B because of my ignorance of how literature works as an academic discipline, apologies.
Richard
“Brief Lives” brings me to an emotional and intellectual stop each and every time I read it. I could not tell you why. As best as I can figure, it’s the description of what life in transition feels like. It gives me pause every time I read it. Like a gasp for breath, then exhalation.
What a great essay on Sandman. I dont totally agree with your thoughts about teens reading sandman as I read it when I was 16 and am only 18 now. My worst enemy and biggest problem when I was 16 was myself. Sandman interested me because the charecters were so skrewed up! They werent perfect and that appealed to me. But hey, everyone is diffrent.
Good article. I think that other commentators have done a good job of pointing out how you might need to unpack your comments about Nada if you want to bring them to a wider, non-academic audience – but otherwise I think there’s a lot going on here that strikes me as accurate. I’ve always felt that The Sandman was a postmodern document with piles of characters that resist its own postmodernism. Which may be a good way to look at 90’s fiction in general, now that I think of it – but nowhere more so than in this series.
[…] Change, change, change: Sandman and the ’90s « Grand Hotel Abyss A moving, thoughtful essay about Sandman as a 90's coming-of-age novel and more. (tags: comics sandman neilgaiman geek toread) […]
Nice essay, grandhotel!
In regards to the Nada comment, my understanding of Marxist theory is not that the author is (intentionally) making a political point, but that stories have political connotations whether we will them or no. The effect of the Nada episode is that we see a white man imprisoning a black woman. That the story doesn’t explicitly say, “Hey! Look at this black woman imprisoned by this white man!” may change our reception of those facts, but doesn’t mean that they are not there. Even though we see Dream appear in other incarnations to other dreamers, the fact remains that he — and correct me if I’m wrong, but Dream is always portrayed as male — is most consistently shown to us as a white hetero male, which leads the reader to implicitly assume this is the quintessential Dream. By the story’s logic, it also leads us to identify the reader to whom Dream appears in this form as another white male. When we look at the world through Dream’s eyes, we are looking at it from a white male perspective. If we accept grandhotel’s reading, and I think he’s made a good case for it, the anti-postmodern POV and the white male POV become one and the same in Dream.
I’m a classicist who’d take Achilles over Odysseus any day, so I don’t think this means we can’t enjoy the stories or like and admire Dream the character. But let’s be aware of our stories’ implications!
Thanks for all the kind comments that have come in since I have been away from the internet for the holidays!
Richard: Charlotte has defended my position better than I could have, though I understand if you’re still not convinced. And literature practiced as an academic discipline can be overrated, so I say as an insider please don’t feel you have to apologize.
Charlotte: Thanks! (And I like your blog–hope you don’t mind if I add you to the roll; I’m a lapsed Catholic, a guilty omnivore and married to someone with a classics minor, so I think we have at least some common ground.)
:) Of course not, lapsed Catholics are the best kind.
[…] blessay[*] by Grand Hotel Abyss places Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series of graphic novels into the context of the 1990s. It identifies tensions between postmodern […]
“I grant that this is bascially the Marxist theory of how to read literature, and it can be used in the dullest, most soul-crushing ways–and I hope I didn’t do that above.”
No, you certainly didn’t. The major problem with Marxist theory in any discipline but especially literary theory is its overwhelming tendency to be reductionistic., which has got to stem from Marx’s own view of Science and the normative baggage that deploying Marxist theory often involves. Many adherents to this particular discipline would argue that the historical context of the work exhausts it. You do not take this approach in your essay. I happen to believe that great works of art by definition cannot be reduced, and it would appear that you’d agree with me on some level there. You did great justice to the material, and I think Gaiman picked up on that in linking your article from his blog.
One note, though: I read Sandman when I was 21, a Junior at University in 2003. I still hold it stratospheric regard (almost absurd, if you here my comparisons) and never really moved decisively to other works of literature, since I’d encountered them already. It never performed quite the functions for me- as either a gateway for high literature or arena for working out the the personal impact of change on identity- as it did for you at 16, or at 26 for that matter. It was, though, unquestionably emotionally powerful for I think the same reasons. I was halfway between your two ages, though, so maybe I was in a decent position to take in the complexity of both of the perspectives each of your readings suggested. Or, I’m just being indulgent.
Cheers,
Dan
Dan, thanks for the compliments. Yeah, if you read some of my other posts, you will see that I am fed up with Marxist revisionism in literary and cultural criticism, even though I still believe in the importance of Marxist thought to analyzing political events (a true Marxist would reject that these things are separable, of course, which is why as you say so many of them see a work as being exhausted by its historical content).
I would be interested to hear your Sandman comparisons, actually….
[…] of how one should respond to a broken world. Characters such as Death, Destruction, and Dream represent different modes of action: pragmatic and cautiously hopeful; detached and anarchistic; or absolutist and idealistic. […]
[…] reading Neil Gaiman’s journal, I stumbled upon a link to a quite excellent essay about Sandman and the 90s. Dream, on the other hand, and not just Dream but also Orpheus and […]
[…] Interesting discussion of Sandman, focusing on the debate between “accept that change happens, adjust, and do your work” (Death), “accept that change happens and drop out” (Destruction), and “refuse to accept change, refuse to adjust” (Dream). Via Amberite. […]
[…] 4) A non-political interlude: an essay on Sandman’s reflection of ethics, adolescence and the 1990s. […]
[…] insights. I’m never sure I understand it. So I was delighted to discover (via Alas, a blog) this essay on the meaning of the Sandman. [Sandman] turns out to concern the decisions one makes about how to […]
[…] Sandman and the 90s. […]
[…] have been reading Grand Hotel Abyss ever since their fantastic post about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic series. The blog is steeped in literary theory, and I […]
[…] “Change, change, change: Sandman and the ’90s” […]
It is perfect time to make some plans for the future and it is time to be happy. I’ve read this post and if I could I want to suggest you few interesting things or suggestions. Maybe you can write next articles referring to this article. I want to read more things about it!
Neil Gaiman is a very talented writer. I didn’t like the adaptation of mirror mask too much though, found it very disappointing.
[…] theme of change and compromise/pragmatism versus absolutism is extremely well explored in this blog, so I won’t go into that at all. I was drawn to Sandman, somewhat unusually, by the surface […]
[…] wydaje się sposób podania poważnej problematyki. W jednej z popularnych analiz znajdujemy cytat: Sandman zadaje etyczne i polityczne pytania: czy lepiej zaakceptować świat takim, jaki jest, i że… Nie wydaje mi się, żeby podtekst był aż tak polityczny. Śnienie jednak stanowi alegorię […]
[…] thoughts on the original 10-volume Sandman series can be found here. Overture, Gaiman’s prequel, serialized between 2013 and 2015 and now collected in a deluxe […]
[…] science. I recommend them all. And now we're back to things that entertain me. Srsly. I found this GREAT post on Gaiman's Sandman series, and how well it has aged. I LOVE Sandman (well, what I've read of it, I […]