UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
Master Thesis:
The Metafiction of Neil Gaiman’s The
Sandman
Author: Ivana Babić
Submission date: June 30, 2016
Discipline of study: MA English Literature and Culture
Supervisor: Dr. Joyce Goggin
1
Statement of Originality
This document is written by Ivana Babić who declares to take full responsibility for the
contents of this document.
‘I declare that the text and the work presented in this document is original and that no
sources, other than those mentioned in the text and its references, have been used in creating it.’
The Faculty of the Humanities is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of
2
Contents
Abstract 3
Introduction 4
Chapter One: The Socio-Historical Context 12
Chapter Two: The Myth 18
Chapter Three: The Archetypes 44
Conclusion 54
3
Abstract
This thesis’ main focus is the fantastic narrative of The Sandman, a comic book series which
explores the storytelling as such. As will be shown further on, in the introduction, fantasy is a
frequent genre in comics and it is what enables a multiplicity of themes and forms to enter the
medium.
The conception that stories, which are shaped by the human experience, in turn shape us and
tell us something new about ourselves, lies at the heart of The Sandman. Gaiman uses this idea
to formulate the principles of the modern world within the comics.
Furthermore, this thesis will try and see how the techniques used by Gaiman relate to the
comics legacy. Over a course of time comics has developed a self-reflexive approach to
storytelling through intertextuality, specifically parody, which has foregrounded the
metafictional aspect of their narratives. The potential of developing such complex narratives
stems from the deep connection Anglophone comics have with the Western popular culture,
within which they emerged.
This heightened awareness of the constructed nature of stories in the American society, which helped create such comics, in hands of the ‘outside’ writers have secured a prominent place of
metafiction in the comics medium.
A rich and unique metanarrative, The Sandman explore the potential that lies in storytelling
itself through creation of an elaborate modern day mythology. For this purpose, Gaiman also
employs Junigian theory of archetypes in order to reflect upon the universal forces of human
4
Introduction
The thesis will examine the comics The Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman as a metafictional
narrative. Following the pioneers like Watchmen and Swam Thing1, The Sandman continued
the work on reimagining the superhero. It was published in monthly instalments of twenty four
pages from December 1988 to March 1996, and later collected into a comic book form.
When writing about The Sandman this is always an inevitable note, as the numbering in the
comic book series does not follow the sequential numbering of the monthly instalments, which
can create confusion when citing. For this reason, it should be made clear that this thesis will
refer to the work in its book form.2
There are two reasons for this sort of referencing. The first reason is it is much more expensive
to come by individual issues than it is the collection. More importantly, the second reason is
that The Sandman is constructed in long story arcs that are more easily followed in the book
form than in the individual issues. Thus, referring to the collection will allow for a somewhat
easier overview.
As any comics reader will know, there is nothing strange in having complicated long story arcs
in comics, either monthly series or comic books. It is, furthermore, not unusual to have a whole universe rebooted, or character’s history deleted.3 These techniques, known as retcon and
reboot, are part of the comics’ narrative as they are of the publishers’ advertising and sales
strategies. In other words, both the readership and the publishers are fine with the premise that
1 See Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion.
2 For more details on this see Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion in which he notes complications with
numbering as well as with reprints of stories. It gives a clear and concise overview of the issues in the collection.
5 anything is possible in the comics. However, everyone (meaning the comics readership) also
expects comics to be “real”4. This apparent paradox points to the relationship comics have with
the (Western) popular culture and the study of the self-reflexive qualities in comics cannot be
complete without such socio-historical contexts.
Furthermore, this thesis proposes that The Sandman is a postmodern narrative which is
structured primarily as a myth. As any postmodern work of art, one that is “conscious of its own historicity” (McHale, 1, paragraph 9), The Sandman is a net of popular and literary, as
well as philosophical influences. A meta-story about stories, this comic book series makes use of the Anglophone culture’s historical contexts and makes it a base for its own narrative
structure, from which it expands to other related cultures as per need. In this way, Gaiman’s
primary inspiration for the Lord of Dreams lies in the Greek mythology. However, in a true
metafictional fashion, his story is meticulously deconstructed and retold, using global religions
and myths (e.g. Egyptian, African and Siberian folk tales, as well as Christianity and Islam).
Although The Sandman’s narrative spans over the mythologies of the world, with African
folklore and Japanese philosophies, Siberian oral tales and Egyptian deities, it is nevertheless
firmly rooted in the West, with its history and mythologies, both through the use of the
traditional myths and numerous references to its popular culture. We will therefore also shine
some light on the socio-historical context of the development of the American superhero genre,
as it was this environment that fostered the self-reflexivity in comics’ narratives.
Additionally, the mythological structure allows story-telling to become the central theme and
supersede the importance of any one character. It also empowers the individual and provides
valuable insights into the heteroglossic nature of the world.
4 As in, events happening in real time, a superhero that could be anyone around us, because he lives a regular
6 Gaiman has created a universe in which the elements of fantasy and of reality not only coexist
but merge and collapse boundaries at many points in order to uncover the postmodern
philosophy of reality as a construct at its core. This invented cosmology that is presented
through mythical narrative structure provides the grounds for exploring the instability of
meaning.
The Sandman, thus, on the tradition of mythical storytelling, builds a postmodern,
self-reflexive narrative that offers an insight into how meaning is created and organized.
This thesis will, finally, argue that The Sandman builds up a metanarrative from many varied
individual stories based on the Jungian theory of archetypes, in order to explore the way the
unconscious spills into our narratives to form patterns of thoughts.
We shall see how through familiar modes of narration Gaiman offers a self-reflexive study
of the purpose of narratives, which is to free the reader “from the anxiety of meaninglessness
by the recognition that not only can literature never be free in terms of literary tradition; it also
cannot be free either in its relation to the historical world or in its relation to readerly desire.”(Waugh, 67)
The next chapter will serve as an overview of the relevant social and historical contexts that
fostered the development of the form of comics this thesis is concerned with; the metacomics.
That is to say comics as a self-referential narrative, in the sense that it analyses itself as a medium but also “…the determining conditions of the work- its institutional setting, its
historical positionality, its address to beholders,” (Mitchell, 36) to borrow the explanation from
Picture Theory. Admittedly, unlike what Mitchell talks about, comics is not an exclusively
pictorial medium and it should not be treated as such, but borrowing terms from both literary
and comparative art studies in order to explore the image and text relationship can be helpful
7 Comics has come a long way since the time it was considered a bad influence that corrupts a
child’s ability to read literature5. It has brought along a valuable set of new information on how
value systems (in culture as well as art, both communal and personal) change their narratives.
Building on the postmodern scholarly legacy, the academic circles have been producing works
which explore the comics form by trying to establish adequate terminology and appropriate
theoretical approach to such narratives, but also the history as well as social and political
significance of what has come to be known as a sequential art, a term pioneered by Will Eisner
and Scott McCloud (e.g. Orion Kidder’s doctoral dissertation as well as The Rise and Reason
of Comics and Graphic Literature turn toward individual phenomena or artists in order to
explore the genre rather than trying to categorise and catalogue all the work in this form).
5 This was the attitude of the U.S. Congress, more specifically the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile
Delinquency, supported (among others) by the research and opinions of the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, which led to the establishment of the self-censoring regulations called the Comics Code that was developed by the Comics Magazine Association of America. Orion Usner Kidder’s dissertation provides a nice overview of both the significance of the Code, as well as the challenges of comics’ historiography.
8
Chapter One: The Socio-Historical Context
Although, as Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest point out6, the term has failed to catch on
in general usage, it almost feels as if the name “sequential art/narrative” has justified the
academic interest in the medium, but “sequential” has hardly been the only word used to
describe it.7 Whether this is true or not, it is certain that comics, as any art form, has evolved; its narrative has exceeded the pre-established boundaries and gone beyond “the usual way” of
communicating with its readers/viewers. It is perhaps this new take in the comics development, this often termed “graphic novel” aspect of storytelling (to distinguish it from or possibly
renounce its pre-Code legacy) that induced interest in this art form, initiating lengthy
discussions and theories about contemporary comics and its beginnings. However interesting
the history of the art form in relation to social contexts might be, this thesis will limit itself to
one of the major events in the Anglophone comics history that shaped the development of the
self-referential comics; the introduction of the Comics Code.
Moreover, curious relationship between image and word in this medium has so far defied
categorisations. It is, indeed, a medium that is “in between”, with few rules and many
variations, which has proven difficult to categorise and define.8
6 In The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature, editors and authors Goggin and Hassler-Forest
collected a number of essays on the form, dealing with everything from development and terminology, contemporary adaptations and politics, to nonfiction subgenre.
7 The history of the critical debate is as rich as comics’ history itself. Kidder traces the debate on comics to
about early 1940s, enumerating a number of examples on how critics have reached in all possible directions to define the characteristics of comics; from completely ignoring the form (like Sheridan) to historically focused definitions of comics form, to conceptualising comics as a syntagmatic system. (Telling Stories About
Storytelling: The Metacomics of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis, pg 9)
8 There is no clear historical overview, no agreement among the scholars on what it is, except that it has
images and words that are often in balloons and gutters, which are variously termed by different scholars, which are gaps in between the images where at least part of the meaning is created through the
9 What is clear, though, is that comic book writers rely on the skills and competences of their
audience (i.e. they must trust that the reader/viewer will recognize the shapes, the importance
of perspective, know how to recognize and decode symbols, analyse the plot etc.), who make
the often masterfully suggested snippets of time and space on the comics pages come to life.
This might very well be why the Comics Code era brought about the self-reflexivity; in an
effort to please the audience (and their parents?) and through the process of thinking about what is “appropriate”, the writers in the genre have started to turn inwards, to explore the
mechanisms of the medium.
Orion Kidder, inspired in part by McHale’s notion of postmodernism as a global crossing on
which writers worldwide found themselves standing before the choice of whether or not to
cross the street once the light turned green, writes extensively on meta-comics and their
development in his dissertation9. He places the market demand for realism in the centre of his
argument that Silver-Age (i.e. the mainstream) and Underground comics, the two main types
of narratives at the time, helped “teach American comic-book audience how to read/view metacomics” (Kidder, 53) while trying to provide for the market demands. He uses Todorov’s
term, verisimilitude, to explain the nature of reality in the comics, arguing the devices used by
comics, both Silver-Age and Underground, work towards the introduction of metacomic
techniques into the medium.
Verisimilitude is thus useful to him in exploring the nature of dual expectations (for a more
realistic fantastic narrative) that occurred in comics, but it also serves to show that the fantastic
genre of comics turns the concept on its head by applying it to fantasy and turning it into a “convention of perception” (Kidder, 55). In this way, he makes clear that the narrative
techniques (e.g. intertextuality, self-reference, parody etc.) had been present for a while before
9 See Telling Stories About Storytelling: The Metacomics of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis for more
10 the metacomics emerged, and have been brought to the centre when the social circumstances
provided a favourable space for them. That is to say, the time of the Code.
Whether the implementation of the Code is seen an ingenious marketing strategy or a genuine
attempt to purify and protect the medium by the Comics Code Authority, there is no denying
it was an important moment of cultural self-questioning, induced by an art form which had, by
that point, gotten into the stage where value and quality were measured in sales numbers.
As Nyberg notes in Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, the Code was largely
written by several of the leading publishing houses of the day (Nyberg, 106), which would
imply that its purpose was primarily to keep the sales numbers from declining.
In this way, the U.S Senate did what parents had asked; it protected the youth and maintained
the free-market, as the CCA was able to introduce the self-regulated “highly authoritarian”(
Kidder, 61) document. This shows the interdependence between the popular culture (i.e. the
readership and its parents or guardians) and the medium, but it also demonstrates the
importance of the publishing industry in the creation of comics. In this way, many major
publishing houses chose to be included in the Association, and to obtain Seal of Approval,
exclusively to keep up (or boost) the sales.
Whether the aim was to improve the comics genre or to keep up the sales numbers, it is
important to recognize both the Code’s significance in installing the notion of compliance to
authority in Silver Age style, as well as the ensuing ‘rebellion’ that was brought about by the
Underground comix.10
10 Underground comix saw its boom in 1960s as a small-press or self-published alternative to the mainstream
superhero genre, deliberately depicting provocative content forbidden by the Code thus exhibiting the freedom of writing/drawing in the medium. For this reason they were sold primarily in head shops, targeting alternative subcultures.
11 This division; the mainstream that followed the Code and the alternative that rebelled against “the authority” primarily by mocking and parodying the themes in mainstream comics, will
make it ok for the comics to be self-referential, to not only question how best to serve their
purpose, but to question the purpose as well.
Of course, the Underground comix history, just like the superhero genre, has a much longer
line of development, but it was not until the Code that the two would engage in a dialogue that
was crucial for the introduction of metanarrative techniques into the medium. Indeed, Kidder
makes it a central point of his dissertation to argue that Revisionist comics, i.e. the comics at
which core lies the struggle to reinvent or revise the notion of reality in (primarily) superhero
genre, draw their metanarrative techniques from these two styles. They are understood here as
styles within the comics medium, and not eras or ages, primarily because any categorization of
ages so far has proven to be too problematic. 11 Admittedly, ages as eras are part of the comics
culture and should not be ignored, but for the purposes of understanding The Sandman’s
background, the terms Silver Age, Revisionist and Underground comix will do well to name
and differentiate between predominant narrative techniques within the medium, in order to
understand the metafictional aspect of comics.
Undoubtedly, it is possible to see that the preoccupation with the sense of reality and time in
Silver Age style (e.g. the sense that superhero adventures are forever in the present; superheroes such as Superman or Batman don’t age, but they do change according to contemporary moral
norms) could have induced questions such as “What is time? What is real? What is a world?”
that would be asked by metacomics. Kidder is, however, careful not to suggest this transition
from Silver Age to Revisionist (that he equates to metacomics) is a straight forward affair by
11 There is little agreement in categorization between fans, publishers, creators and scholars because of their
differing motivations for constructing these systems, as thoroughly explained by Christopher Woo in “An Age Old Problem: Problematics of Comic Book Historiography”.
12
drawing a comparison between the Silver Age/Revisionist relationship and
modern/postmodern dichotomy, and quoting Brian McHale’s Constructing Postmodernism. In
this sense, the shift is not a radical break with the previous traditions, but two alternatives that
exist together and do not merely progress from one to another.
So, while the metanarratives emerged partly due to challenges Silver Age style met in respect
with the fantastic-vs.-real contradiction (thus the solutions such as retcon and reboot devices),
it did not necessarily signify the end of the Silver Age style of storytelling. In fact, such comics,
as Kidder notes, have been commercially successful although their self-reflective techniques
(again, the aforementioned retcon) are generally unsuccessful in obtaining the coherent
relationship between the fantastic and the conventions of realism. Similarly, the formulaic
nature of the Silver Age leaves them devoid of the freedom to explore or experiment with the
modes of narration.
In other words, their narratives are too rigid because their main purpose is to establish an internal order, a stable image. The “shifting of aspects, the display of pictorial paradox and
forms of nonsense” (Mitchell, 57) that Mitchell sees as internal structural effects of
multistability in a metapicture may occur in SA comics in the attempt to stabilize the
relationship between the seemingly real and the fantastic. Kidder compares the way in which
Silver Age narratives achieve fluidity to the way a bag of marbles would behave like a fluid,
saying how the (both publishers and creators’) drive to create stories that could continuously
be told without any big changes over time leads to the overuse of narrative devices that create
more contradictions than resolutions. So, “the more SA comics attempt to maintain the neverwhen, and fixity in general, the more they insatiate the fluidity.”(Kidder, 67)
On the other hand, Underground comix were perceived as “an unsavoury deviation from the
13 “Imagetext”,par. 9). Such comic books were, in this sense, free of rules and sales numbers,
which provided a space for personal expression. In the rebellion against the Code, Underground
comix exhibit the “wildness of the metapicture”(Mitchell, 57) through (primarily) parody of
the contemporary themes which, in order to be successful, needs to be recognizable. This is
achieved through what Kidder and Hatfield call “ironic authentication” (Kidder, 80), i.e. the
paradox in which by stating its own falsehood the information becomes more honest.
So, while Silver Age comics struggle to create a perfect resemblance to reality in the
primarily fantastic genre (e.g. the aforementioned sense that superheroes live forever in the
present, or can cross from one reality/universe into another), Underground comix strived to
mimic that struggle in order to ridicule the conventions and moral values of the style and, to
put it plainly, show how ‘fake’, limited that narrative is.
Unsurprisingly, Underground comix were consequently limited as a “reactive, counter-cultural product.”(Witek, par.8) This means that those comix that parodied themes and narrative
techniques of superhero comics were not only highly self-referential but also greatly dependant on the audience’s knowledge of the mainstream narratives. To mention but one example, when
talking about Zap#4, Witek singles out a Superman parody starring Wonder Wart-Hog who,
like Superman, hides his true identity and is enamoured with a co-worker who is in turn
attracted to his alter ego.
His disguise as a reporter, as well as the scene in which Wonder Wart beats an infamous
cartoonist Robert Scum (the infallible allusion to Crumb) saying “I’ll teach you to corrupt innocent American kids, you God damn fucking son of a bitch! You prick! You cocksucker!”
(Witek, par. 22) is a fine example of that layered parody that relies on the reader’s knowledge
14 the self-imposed restrictions of the main stream as well as its own role as a rogue in the comics’
world.
In other words, for the comix to have any meaningful effect on our understanding of it,
readers need to be familiar with the historical and social context that is being reflected upon in
it. Thus, although through parody comix gains the freedom of expression, the Underground comix’ narratives concerned with Code and mainstream relationship have its own clearly
defined parameters within the social context.
It might seem SA style is more superior to the Underground. It might also be considered to
be true from the commercial aspect. However, both are equally important for bringing meta-
elements to the forefront, as their interaction with each other as well as the audience sets comics
storytelling on a new path, one that has by this point gone global not only through literature,
but audio and visual media as well. 12
Indeed, it could be said that the relationship between the readership and comics draws
similarities to the relationship between The Sandman’s Endless and humans, in that the
interaction between the two serves as an example of instability of power relations; we are never
quite certain where the centre of it lies.
Thus, the Code dominated comics publishing gradually brought about concerns over narrative
stability and, in doing so, paved the way for the postmodern narratives of The Sandman or
Watchmen, for example, as well as the remakes of the superhero narratives (i.e. Batman: The Dark Knight, The Amazing Spider-Man, etc.), all of which worked on reinventing the image of
a superhero through metafictional elements.
12 See Brian McHale in Reconstructing Postmodernism, where he discusses the phenomenon of “global
postmodernism”, offering several possible explanations for it and finishing with the very optimistic third possibility of a “dialogic moment” in which cultures of the world are able to exchange models and memes outside the contexts of colonialism and neo-colonialism.
15 Although not immune to the profit making purposes of their publishers, the new wave of
comics’ narratives are in a bigger measure creator-owned and more independent. They could
now tap into horror, fiction, crime, biography, satire and so on, in order to create narratives that
explore the relationship between the fantastic and the real in a new way. The questions such as: “What is reality?”, “What makes the world around us real?” often become focal, and unlike
Silver Age, metacomics (dubbed Revisionist by Kidder) has no intention of creating a stable
narrative. Things can fall apart, heroes and good people can die too, superheroes go rogue,
morals are twisted and bad guys are not always punished or not always as bad. Furthermore,
explanation for the impossible is not necessarily provided, and real sometimes feels strange.
Pictures and words have now become a platform for multidimensional deconstruction of
stories; collective and individual ones, famous and old ones as well as those never heard before.
Building on the legacy of the Underground comix’ parody, such comics often use bricolage to
shape their narratives, which reflects the ontological turn they have undertaken (for example,
in The Sandman, Shakespeare is initially a lousy writer who acquires his skills through a pact
with the Dream Lord, in exchange for two plays that will turn out to parallel both of their lives,
posing questions as to how much control one has over one’s life and imagination, and whether
it is his imagination at all).
Kidder places these meta-stories under the term Revisionist in saying they “embrace various
forms of self-reflexivity with which they can actively analyse their own fantastic nature and its relationship to conventional realism” (2) thus blurring “the common-sense separation between
‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’” (3). Additionally, B. Keith Murphy in The Sandman Papers collection
puts forward the importance of being British (although he fails to see the value of Underground
comix’ use of parody). In other words, he ascribes the infusion of horror into the comics genre
16 novels and the Victorian Penny Dreadfuls (4). This can certainly be seen as an added dimension
of the metacomics style, but not the determining factor for its development.
However, there is logic in Kidder’s proposal that the insider-outsider status13 of the newcomer British authors was an invaluable factor in the development of metanarrative
techniques within the genre, especially if we take into account the fact that English counterparts
of the American superhero comics, like Marvelman, share more with the Underground style
than with the Silver Age. Such new takes on the familiar characters meant: a) Britain did not
have the holy respect for the American superhero genre and the existing characters; b) because
there was no sense of holiness about these characters and themes, it meant they could be
reshaped to fit a new environment and a new audience, the British youth that grew up reading comics filled with slapstick and “disdain for authority figures” (The Sandman Papers, 9). It is,
then, easier to understand why it was precisely the British authors who were fitted with the
proper tools to reshape the themes and characters in the American comic books.
In addition, Alan Moore cites the New Wave science fiction of Delany and Zelazny as a massive influence on the writers’ way of thinking about stories, which inspired an idea “that
you could take an old form and create something completely unanticipated with it…” (Bender,
9)
Furthermore, in his essay on the origins of The Sandman, Murphy quotes Gaiman saying: “The problem with a lot of American writers is that they’ve grown up reading comics and
nothing else.” (Gaiman qtd. in “The Origins of the Sandman”, 13) This would insinuate that
this surge of fresh ideas and the audacity to reshape the stories and characters comes from being
13 Kidder notes the British authors possessed a peculiar status among American comics writers as they had
grown up outside of the American culture but within the English speaking country, reading American comics. For him, this is the reason why they had an entirely different notion of what the superhero is. (Find reference) In addition, Murphy argues the British were reading the counterpart of the American comics that was more similar to the underground narratives of the 1960s than the actual superhero style, seeing they were prone to retaining a disdain for authority figures (“The Origins of the Sandman”, The Sandman Papers, 9)
17 able to look at the comics from the outside, as being part of the grander universe with complex
moral values. Both McHale and Kidder recognize the importance of what McHale calls “bi-culturalism” (McHale, Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism, 361) in the emergence of
ontologically oriented postmodern fiction: In an era increasingly dominated by Internet and
global interconnections in all fields of human activity, Anglophone comics could hardly be
expected to stay unaffected by the outside sources (or indeed, to not affect other cultures).
So, finally, the emergence of metacomics can be seen as the natural progression of a medium
that is closely connected and dependant on its audience, as well as on the fact that it is read not
only in the Anglophone countries, but in other, non-English speaking places around the world.
The turn towards the postmodern in the comics opens the medium up to the memes of the other,
non- Anglophone cultures, as we see in The Sandman.
The collection thus mixes religious myths, newspaper clippings, high literature and popular
culture. Gaiman creates a postmodern context in which the story constantly draws the reader in, insinuating that “it” could have happened to her as well, but it also makes the reader/viewer
aware of the constructed nature of the text. Comics is specific in this sense because its
constructed nature is very apparent from the very beginning - it is drawn, so the pictures on the
page show us a lot more than words alone and one might argue that less is left to the reader’s/viewer’s imagination. Also, we need to suspend our disbelief in order to “believe”,
and then ultimately know what we have known all along: this is not real. There must, therefore, be “the coexistence of a frame of reference that is both outside the story and yet is somehow
invoked or referred to from inside the story, such that the boundary between inside and outside is blurred.” (Atkinson, 109,110)
Gaiman chooses myth as a formal category precisely because of its fictitious nature; we are
18
Chapter Two: The Myth
Sandman, originally a folklore character, was a pseudonym of several superhero characters in
the DC universe, and was then picked up as the name of the title character of the adult comic
book series of the 80s and 90s in which its (re)creator, on the basis of familiar narratives of
Western culture (i.e. central European folklore, Greek mythology), strips it down to the basic
idea of the lord of dreams, giving him all the names at once.
This enables Gaiman to use Dream as a bricolage: he becomes the perfect frame through which
Gaiman can explore the width and the depth of the genre. Thus he is called Morpheus, Oneiros,
Dream Shaper, Dream Lord, Dream, Sandman, Kai’ckul etc., depending on the perspective of
the creature with whom he is interacting. In “Dream of the Thousand Cats” he is pictured as a
cat, alluding to the abilities of the Oneiroi as well as borrowing and building on the ancient
Greek myth of Dream gods. But Gaiman does not exclude any other stories of the Dream Lord: “Names are used to display the arbitrary control of the writer, and the arbitrary relationship of
the language…” (Waugh, 94) In this way, the metafiction focuses on the problem of
referencing through names.
This chapter will explore myth as a fictional frame that will, through the use of metafictional devices, be deconstructed in order to provide “extremely accurate models for understanding
the contemporary experience as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems.” (Waugh, 9)
Besides the references to the mythical creatures of Classical antiquity, readers are bound to
read/ see the allusions to European folklore as well as popular culture14 throughout the series,
14 In Preludes and Nocturnes’s story “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, a reference to Ella Fritzgerald’s song, John
19 but especially in the Preludes and Nocturnes. Each of the stories in the first book gives us bits
and pieces about the Sandman myth so thoroughly that it even includes the explanation for the
pre-superhero phenomenon that is Wesley Dodds.15 Through these stories we are given
information about the Lord of Dreams, his artefacts and his powers. We see not only what he
can do, but what happens if he is absent, prevented from acting. Gaiman creates a sort of
bulletproof myth, a mega myth that can claim centuries’ worth of stories as mere shreds of this one “true” story.
The myth in The Sandman runs through multiple individual stories which sometimes feel
unrelated but come together through the title character’s monomyth. Gaiman uses this type of
storytelling to create layers upon layers of fictional frames that enable the reader/viewer to look
at the story from the inside and the outside at the same time.
Being a metaficitonal work in which the central theme is the storytelling itself, The Sandman
represents an archive of familiar stories from all over the world and different aspects of life,
that have been presented in a new, unfamiliar way. Familiar stories are thus transported to an
unfamiliar setting, revolving around a family of anthropomorphic creatures, the Endless, who
embody the driving forces of the human existence and are named according to their ‘power’;
Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Despair, Desire and Delirium.
The name Endless stems from the idea that the fundamental forces they are projections of are
indestructible, immortal. In this way, they are the perfect plot generators: As immortal beings
their existence, as well as the narrative itself, is unlimited by time. Furthermore, the nature of
magic dust in your eyes and brings you…sweet dreams.” After she tells him “Morpheus. The Oneiromancer (…) The Sandman” is back.
15 A 1930s comics character appears immediately in the first story, “Sleep of the Just”, in his green business
suit and his fedora. Wearing a gas mask “he puts evil people to sleep with gas, then sprinkles sand on them, leaves them for the police to find in the morning...” (Preludes and Nocturnes, 30)
20 their existence entails they possess god-like powers over human beings. This, in turn, means
human notions of the world (that is to say, their stories) are bound to be driven by such forces.
The focal characters, thus, literally reflect the notion in the theory of narrative that literary
characters are not human beings. In The Sandman, they really are not. They are indeed “anthropomorphic figures provided with specifying features the narrator tells us about” (Ball,
112) that resemble human beings but are not “real”. By constructing a narrative around a group
of characters that are not human but resemble people, Gaiman calls attention to the constructed
nature of those with whom literature is concerned.
As we have seen, comics historiography shows that fantasy in the comics genre always operates
on the opposite side of the spectrum to reality (Clark Kent is Superman but nobody knows his
superpower, and he never flies as Clark Kent, with the glasses and the suit). The
readers/viewers are used to a special kind of reality in comics, one that accommodates the
fantastic without changing the course of human history. That, as Kidder notes, is possible
because the viewer/reader enters a sort of a pact with the writer, agreeing to postpone her
disbelief.
However, that is only possible because reality is always clearly dominant over fantasy. In
other words, as long as there is a familiar social system that does not radically change through
the introduction of the fantastic elements, we are willing to accept the fantastic elements as part
of that system (e.g. Clark Kent may be able to reverse time if he flies really fast but we still feel that he is his mother’s and father’s son- he has parents whom he loves and that makes him
“real”). The Sandman’s anthropomorphic hero defies this expectation by being very much not
human (i.e. not only is he seen by different species in different ways but also does not hold
21 By choosing such a title hero Gaiman creates the familiar narrative that is typically used to explain phenomena and employs an alien character through whom he can provide “a critique
of commonly accepted cultural forms of representation”(Waugh, 8). Myths, as sacred stories
about the origins of human kind and the world, represent the very essence of the human condition; the need to know, or more so, to organize the world around us. Indeed “in the myth
the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind” (Campbell, 15). This is
why such a story is an excellent frame for Gaiman to dismember and uncover the inner workings of the narrative in order to dig deeper into the relationship between humans and “the
world”.
The setting for The Sandman is mainly divided between two worlds; the waking world and the Dreaming, Lord Dream’s realm. However, other worlds that appear throughout the narrative
indicate the postmodern notion of the world as manifold constructions that derive from the
human rationalization of the world. In this way, Hell, Hades, as well as some of Dream’s siblings’ realms and the realm of Faerie, all become story settings. Some of the individuals’
dreaming worlds are also part of the Dreaming, but have their own autonomy and reign over
their dreamers, such as Jed’s dream in which he becomes an observer of the “life” of Hector and Hyppolita Hall, two pawns taken by the rogue nightmares Brut and Glob during Sandman’s
imprisonment to pose as a surrogate dream king.
Because The Sandman as a metacomic deals with its own origin, the mythical structure can
provide the perfect self-reflexive tools to accommodate abstract ideas without causing the collapse of the “real world”. So, myths, as (sacred) stories about the origins of human kind and
the world, internalize the very essence of the human condition; the need to know, or more so,
22 The collection begins with, and is thus framed by, the imprisonment. In a manner of an eerie
gothic novels16, the reader is introduced to the Lord of Dreams at his weakest, and to the
consequences suffered by the humanity (e.g. snippets of stories about sleeping sickness are
introduced into the story in order to show what happens to the waking world devoid of dreams).
The central storyline of the first book, structured as hero’s journey, acts as a metaphor for the
entire collection.17 Campbell sees the standard path of a myth as a narrative magnification of
the rite of passage narrative consisting of separation, initiation and return but is careful to note that there is “no final system for the interpretation of myth , and there will never be any such
thing.” (Campbell, 329) In this way, after seven decades of separation by imprisonment,
Morpheus sets out on a quest to reclaim his belongings, for which he needs to descend to the
Underworld and fight against his own powers stored in an amulet in a psychotic’s possession.
Eventually, his powers are restored but this does not bring about narrative resolution. Instead,
it indicates another frame has been set and it parodies the outworn literary conventions in order
to provide a constructive criticism that might lead to the renewal of meanings attached to the
narrative.
Indeed, in Preludes and Nocturnes, the first book of the series, the completion of the epic
quest in the central storyline initiates a more elaborate narrative, one that is concerned with its
own nature as a construct.
Moreover, being already given the god-like characteristics, Sandman is no ordinary hero. The
standard storyline of a hero being forced to leave ordinary surroundings to go to shadow realms
and do battle is here turned upside down; The dweller of the shadow realm is the actual hero
who, entrapped by an ordinary creature in an ordinary world, gives a very long silent treatment
16 This is Gaiman’s British legacy, along with the style of a penny dreadful.
17 The series ends with the rebirth of the hero, who now has new personality, better fitted for the “new”
23 to his captor and generally appears very apathetic towards his destiny. By parodying the
standard structure of the epic journey in this way, The Sandman “deliberately sets itself up to break the norms that have been conventionalized. “ (Waugh, 65) In this act, Waugh notes, the
text liberates itself and the reader through the “paradoxical recognition” that there has never
been a free, original text; it has always been created.
Furthermore, towards the ending of Preludes and Nocturnes, Dream’s existential anxiety
brings about a break in the narrative frame through metalepsis: Morpheus does not so much
celebrate the triumph as he sits in the waking world feeding pigeons and musing on the lack of purpose. He explains the situation to his older sister Death by saying: “I’d had a true quest, a
purpose beyond my function…” (Gaiman, Preludes and Nocturnes, 219) Significantly enough,
through his purpose (i.e. breaking free and retrieving his belongings) he gains his
morphological function (i.e. he is revealed as a hero). Through this, he transgresses the
boundaries of text’s reality and his character and calls attention to his own nature as a construct.
Also, the monomyth in the first book of the collection is symbolic of the entire series, which is
ultimately an overload of heroes’ journeys. The purpose, once more, is to call attention to the
constructed nature of stories in which characters’ quests serve to ultimately reveal them as
characters.
For example, Barbie’s disillusionment after her failed marriage causes the identity crisis and
she is searching for herself quite literally, as it turns out, because the villain called Cuckoo who
is threatening to destroy her perfect dream world is actually her young self. After the successful
self-realisation in the Dreaming, she is faced with the death of her friend in the real world and
does not remember her adventure. To attend her friend’s funeral, she needs to go to Kansas.
24
to the Wizard of Oz18, implying that we are looking and reading about yet more characters.
Finally, we see her waving at us amidst the white smoke while reading: “And if there’s a moral there, I don’t know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.”
(The Sandman: A Game of You, 186). In the next two panels, Barbie turns away and leaves.
She has, indeed, left the stage and has broken the frame of the story by not fulfilling her expected role; she has been reborn through her quest but has failed to return “transfigured and
to teach (us) the lesson of the life renewed.” (Campbell, 15)
We are constantly faced with characters that go through their own quests for self-realisation,
failing to obtain any. Like Shakespeare who, driven by his desire to become a good writer, strikes a bargain with Dream to write him two plays. Shakespeare’s quest for a good story
reveals him as a short-sighted man, unable to appreciate anyone or anything as more than story
materials.19 His desire to become a writer stems from the desire to battle and defeat death, to
be remembered forever. He is thus, another hero in this collection. But the way he defeats
death, by making a deal with Dream and writing unforgettable stories while his own life passes him by without him noticing, once again frustrates the reader’s/viewer’s expectations; the hero
does not act like heroes do. Ironically, what both Barbie and Shakespeare (and many other
characters) do is precisely a heroic act of revealing the truth to the reader/viewer.
⃰
Furthermore, the notion of time in The Sandman reflects the complexity of the task of showing
how (and for what purpose) stories are created. The time can flow in a linear way in one story
18 The whole A Game of You book is full of references to Wizard of Oz: Barbie’s helpers can be seen as
Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion seeking a brain, a heart and courage. Martin Tenbones alludes to Toto. Thessaly is a witch, Wanda is from Kansas and there is a hurricane that destroys a building Barbie lives in etc.
19 In The Sandman: Dream Country, Hamnet says of his father W. Shakespeare: “I’m less real to him than any of
the characters in his plays. Mother says he’s changed in the last five years, but I don’t remember him any other way. Judith- she’s my twin sister- she once joked that if I died, he’d just write a play about it.” (75)
25 or a collection (like in Preludes and Nocturnes) and then jump a thousand years into past in
another and go back to recent past or even present once more (e.g. the African folk tale and the
tale of Rose Walker are part of the same collection).
Often there is little sense of sequence in time as readers/viewers are introduced to an army of
new characters. Their stories may have little in common (like Luz, Wilkinson, Prinado and
Martin Tenbones and the serial killers of “The Collectors”) or there may be a longer story arch that tells an individual’s story over a long period of time (such as that of Unity Kincaid or
Barbie, or Lyta Hall), but their stories are always connected to the dreaming world and reveal
different forms of imprisonment.
Additionally, unlike the typical superhero genre, Sandman’s adventures are not at the
forefront. The reader/viewer learns about bits and pieces of the main hero’s history through the
individual and collective (hi)stories that play out over a dispersed course of time. The passage
of time in The Sandman thus serves to tell the grand myth of the Lord of Dreams: By the time
the reader is introduced to Morpheus in the first story, Morpheus has been around for many
millennia and the imprisonment is soon revealed as yet another frame. The storytelling that
jumps back and forth through time, offering snippets of the myth here and there evokes the sense that “life is constructed through frames, and that it is finally impossible to know where
one frame ends and another begins” (Waugh, 29)
This quality of metaficition helps convey the constructed nature of both the story and the
reality. To mention but one example, Fables and Reflections is made up of stories about
characters from disparate times; four stories about emperors, four completely unconnected ones
(“Fear of Falling”, “The Hunt”, “Parliament of Rooks” and “Soft Places”) and the special on
26
loss of chronological order is the ultimate realisation that stories make more stories20, and that
boundaries are so fluent between dreams and reality that it is unwise to deem one less important
than the other. So called “soft places” in The Sandman, where the dreaming world and the real
one merge, crossing the boundaries of time and space, is a good example of this.
Young Marco Polo meets the writer of his future autobiography and Fiddler’s Green21 as G.
K. Chesterton there, “where the border between dreams and reality is eroded, or has not yet formed.” (The Sandman: Fables and Reflections, 141) The linear sequence is not only
challenged but completely lost for the better part of “Soft Places” story, where characters are
brought together from different points in time, which creates a chaotic atmosphere, especially
since the story is told from a point of view of a character that is lost (Marco Polo) and does not
really understand what is happening to him. Gaiman does it emphasize that all of the content here belongs to Morpheus’ narrative. In this way, Dream is the sole linearity. We orientate by
examining his traits and the way he speaks.
Comics is a medium in which much is shown from the very beginning. For one, the
reader/viewer can preview the whole page immediately. Moreover, the story needs to be
strategically distributed by the author over the space on the page and framed into panels. This “physical support for…(the) narrative articulation” (Atkinson, 113) in The Sandman is
challenged by the distribution of time, i.e. the meta-myth is dispersed through an indefinite
amount of time in order to point to the subjective nature of it – we are experiencing the events
as they are controlled by someone else. Because we can also see the images, arranged by someone else in a particular order, we feel like we are in someone’s dream or a memory.
20 For example, in Fabels and Reflections, every story involves characters telling stories.
21 One of Dream’s creations that, after Dream’s imprisonment, assumes human form and escapes the
27 This movement through time and space in the comic book series also serves to undermine the
notion of closure, of finality, thus undermining the mythical structure as such. As previously
mentioned, in the monomyth of Morpheus, the reader may see the whole of the first book as
representing the departure (Sandman’s imprisonment), initiation (escaping the prison, meeting
with the Triple Goddess, the descent into Hell and battles) and return (in which Dream wins
his possessions back and returns to his kingdom).
However, as the first book moves towards the end and Dream converses with his older sister
Death, the whole of the first book reshapes into a call to adventure. It will not be until towards the end of the series that the words: “There is much to do in my kingdom, much to restore,
much to create.” (The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, 234) resonate as the actual resolution
and not just the call to adventure.
Similarly, the quest for the new Dream of the Endless begins soon after the events in the first
book, but the reader remains unaware of the impending destruction of the current Dream until
The World’s End, when the attentive reader starts to suspect Daniel’s purpose and to “connect
the dots”. By the time Dream is destructed the reader is already aware that it is not the end.
This is what time does in The Sandman; it converges stories into one another and erases
boundaries between beginnings and endings. All the individual stories, which were significant
in themselves, take on a larger meaning once the frame collapses when the ending fails to “end”.
Thus, Gaiman’s manipulation of time in the series enables him to create a most elaborate frame
and provides the kind of “space” not provided by the page. That space is where the reflexivity, which “implies an awareness both of language and metalanguage, of consciousness and
28 deconstructs familiar contexts and invites the reader to set out on a hunt for meaning that hides
in the fragments. In this sense, the crucial fragments of meaning are stored in Destruction.
Destruction is one of the Endless who is packed with symbolism. He is referred to as the lost
brother for the better part of the series and is the only Endless to abandon his realm and pursue his interests, explaining “People and things are still created; they still exist; are still destroyed.
They tear down and they build.” (Brief Lives: Journey’s End, 8) Before Delirium talks
Morpheus into the search for Destruction after she remarks that she needs a change. This is,
quite literally, the representation of the mythic path. By stating it in such literal terms, Gaiman
calls attention to the mythic structure. Later on, when Morpheus sets out on a path of change (i.e. he grants his son’s wish to die), the reader remembers the dinner conversation where it
was revealed that an Endless can be destroyed.
In retrospect, Morpheus’ search for Destruction through Orpheus becomes his search for
destruction through the merciful murder of his own blood. The reader then immediately
remembers the events at the beginning of the series: the moment when Morpheus uncovers Desire’s intentions to make him spill family blood by killing a vortex that is Desire’s secret
granddaughter.22 These examples reveal the metafictional tendency as operating on more than
one level “through exaggeration of tensions and oppositions…of frame and frame-break, of
technique and counter technique, of construction and deconstruction of illusion.” (Waugh, 14)
Gaiman plays with symbolism the same way he does with parody, or better yet pastiche - the
purpose is to lay bare the rules and roles in fiction by “preserving the balance between the unfamiliar (the innovatory) and the familiar (the conventional or the traditional)” (Waugh, 12).
The reason why this is such an effective self-reflexive tool is because the constant framing helps to retain reader’s attention and avoid confusion, as the metafiction works through
22 In Doll’s House, Morpheus says: “Was I to take the life of one of our blood, with all that would entail? Or was
29 “regular construction and subversion of rules and systems.” (Waugh, 40) Thus, the nonlinear
narrative, combined with symbolism shows how the framing occurs at the narrative level.
The vortex, on the other hand, is a good example of the framing that is happening at the level
of the page (i.e. image and text). It is through defamiliarization that Gaiman can introduce
fragments that build a bigger frame over the course of the series.
The collection opens with the tale of African queen Nada, Morpheus’ love interest, as part of
the prologue, and is followed by the short introduction of two more Dream’s siblings, Despair
and Desire who introduce the story of Rose Walker, the vortex. The story of vortex becomes
one of the melting pots for the fantastic and the ‘real’ when Rose Walker finds herself “at the crossroads” (Doll’s House, pg 58). Here, the ‘real’ life of Rose Walker is gradually intruded
by her new abilities to bend the boundaries of Dreaming and Waking worlds that emerge
through a series of unusual events. In this way, her dream in which she unintentionally eavesdrops on Morpheus’ and Lucius’ conversation is framed so the panels are tilted to the side
of the paper, forcing the reader to literally shift the perspective. When she encounters Hecate,
the setting is framed by Rose opening doors and entering a dark room. The return to the ‘real’
time is achieved when she turns on the light in the room.
Eventually, over two full pages the image of Rose as vortex, the words “The walls come tumbling down.”(Doll’s House, pg 194) and the four panels filled with confused dreamers,
tilted to four different sides of the world, indicate the crossing of boundaries between dreaming and waking (and between individuals’ dreams) worlds and suggest that the frames have been
broken.
Rose then brings chaos to the worlds by attempting to merge them. She is unable to
comprehend how such an act could cause the whole system to collapse on itself: Without any
30 revealed as constructs here, but the scene comments on the human relationship with our inner
psyche in relation to the outside world.
What’s more, Rose voices the narrative break by saying: “[…] everything we think we know is a lie.”(Doll’s House, pg 221) and “It means the world’s about as solid and as reliable as a
layer of scum on the top of the well of black water […]” (Doll’s House, pg 222) Moreover, a
set of various discourses, such as the serial killers’ reasoning of their actions, the experience of Fiddler’s Green as a human being, the realities of Ken and Barbie whose dreams reflect how
utterly mistaken they are about their image of themselves as a happy couple, serve to undermine
the credibility of one possible reality. In other words, the lives of the people in the Waking
world reveal the struggle between the inner and outer worlds, while the vortex comments on “the concept of reality as a fiction.” (Waugh,51)
Another important metafictional tool in The Sandman is intertextuality, which is employed to
create a bricolage of styles from both literature and visual arts that, again, call the attention to
the “relation of ‘fiction’ to ‘reality’, the concept of pretence.” (Waugh, 41)
For this purpose, Morpheus’ imprisonment is told as a parody of the gothic fiction, the snippet from Jed’s dreams is visually and verbally a pastiche of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in
Slumberland comic strips, Shakespeare performs his “Midsummer Night’s Dream” for Dream
and the party of fairies on a meadow, and “Tales in the Sand” was drawn and told in a repetitive
layout in a manner of an oral narrative.23
Intertextuality appears on any scale, from allusions (in the form of song lyrics or a
character24) to the award-winning pastiche of the aforementioned Shakespeare’s play A
23 Jed’s dream and “Tales in the Sand” examples are explained by Neil Gaiman in an interview with Hy Bender
in The Sandman Companion
24 The librarian Lucius is revealed as the first raven, which according to Wikipedia might be an allusion to Mr
31
Midsummer Night’s Dream. In this play specifically, defamiliarization is achieved in a
matryoshka style of storytelling through Puck, who we see play an actor who plays Puck after
he knocks the actor unconscious, saying: “You played me well, mortal. But I have played me for time out of mind. And I do Robin Goodfellow better than anyone.” (The Sandman: The
Dream Country, 77) Thus, the reader is able to see the familiar through a new frame; a work
of high literature in a popular medium, where a character’s original characteristics are being
reused to highlight a new point of view. Puck goes on to become an integral part of the Sandman’s monomyth. As involuntarily predicted by Peaseblossom, Puck will be “that
giggling-dangerous-totally-bloody-psychotic-menace-to-life-and-limb…” (The Sandman: The
Dream Country, 72). But his ability to “escape” the frame of his own story and to step into
Morpheus’ monomyth signifies the need to “release new and more authentic forms.”
(Waugh,65)
Puck’s purpose transgresses the boundaries of his own story, as he breaks the frame by saying:
“And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding than a dream. Gentles- do not reprehend. If
you pardon we will mend.” (The Sandman: The Dream Country, 85) Reminding the reader that
she is looking at an artificial content, he will move on to another story: The metaphorical
elements break into more metaphorical elements, uncovering ever new levels of artifice.
We have seen thus far that the monomyth is built through retardation; a dispersion of time, a
delay in resolution or an incomplete resolution, all of which point to the cyclical nature of the
meatcomic. Furthermore, there is a constant clash of familiar and unfamiliar stories, of the
beginning and of the end, fantastic and real, story and history, immortal and mortal, female and
male, self and other etc. In true postmodernist fashion, the comic book challenges the idea of
centre by exploring the notion of dychotomies. Gaiman points to the opposites as the
constructions of the human mind that we employ to make sense of our inner worlds. They are,
32 Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series, pg 21) In The Sandman dichotomies such
as male/female, bad/good, death/life, and reality/fantasy clash in all manner of ways, most of
the time even in a single storyline, to challenge the authority of consciousness in which they
reside. Ironically, the comic book examines dichotomies as the fundamental structures of the
narrative through the tensions of building and breaking the frame.
The first and most obvious of the dichotomies is the division between the waking world and
the dreaming world, which will show there is no objective world; there are only alternatives,
arising through the process of “accepting and flaunting the creation/description paradox”.
(Waugh, 90) The story of Lyta Hall, for example, starts in the second book where she is a
pregnant prisoner of nightmares (Brut and Glob) in Rose Walker’s brother’s dream25 and Mrs.
Sandman to (the deceased) Hector Hall, a DC character, and she has this slight suspicion she
ought to have had a baby by now. In this way, she starts off as a construct, a stuff of dreams,
to be turned into a ‘human being’ once the dream has been dispersed by Morpheus.
Moreover, it is also alluded that she was a superhero Fury and a daughter of Wonder Woman.
The purpose of this is twofold: The allusion to an already existing comics’ character is the
self-referential tool that reveals her as a construct, but at the same time foreshadows her new
purpose. She will later falsely believe that Morpheus kidnapped Daniel and will seek revenge,
helped by the Triple Goddess. Her brief agency turns out to be another frame and she is finally revealed as a “pawn…who briefly became a knight…or a queen. And you’ve just been taken
off the board.” (The Kindly Ones: Part Thirteen, 20) During the time she was possessed by the
power of the Three in Dreaming, she lives an utterly miserable life in real world, unable to take
care of herself. Her actions in the Dreaming ultimately cause her pain in the Waking world.
The reader is once again reminded of the struggle for ‘realness’.
25 Another good example. Jed’s waking world is made so miserable by the stuff of dreams that he escapes it by
33 This is shown much more literally in “A Dream of A Thousand Cats”, in which it is explicitly
stated that stories not only affect the real world but shape reality. In it, we learn that cats were
once superior to humans and the only reason why humans are now living the kind of reality in
which they are superior to cats is because they once chose to believe.
When talking about the metaficitional novel, Patricia Waugh identifies the Saussurean dichotomy of langue and parole, i.e “the language systems (a set of rules) and any act of
individual utterance that takes place within this system” (Waugh, 11), explaining how every
metaficitional work sets its individual parole against the langue, the traditional codes. This is
highly symptomatic of the Sandman’s structure, divided onto the otherworldly and that which
resembles the real world, in which the fantastic realm on the first look seems to be ruling over
the Waking world (i.e. the resemblance of reality). As we have seen in the above examples, the
relationship between what is real and what is fictional is unstable. One is not more powerful
than the other. If anything, one is the other.
Here, we can again turn to the example of Barbie. Her dream’s characters escape into her reality when the dreaming “place” is in danger of the Cuckoo. The same character, a fluffy Martin
Tenbones, can also get killed- as he does- in the real world. Barbie’s dreamland is an elaborate
Land in which she is a princess, known by her full name. This indicates a curious relationship between Barbie’s external and internal worlds: in the dreaming she has the agency and purpose
that she lacks in the real world. A typical hero, dreaming up the adventure with pursuit, loss of
friends and betrayal/realization on the one hand, and a character paralyzed by the lack of
introspective abilities on the other.
Similarly, the bad-good dichotomy is explored here. Cuckoo is a villain in Barbie’s dream
land with an agenda to kill her, who turns out to be her young “almost” self, captured in a limbo
34 place for it to nest in. Thus, Gaiman alludes to the idea of personal responsibility through Barbie’s story: The good and bad stems from the same place, symbolized here through Barbie’s
struggle with the self, both in the dreaming and the waking world.
The Sandman’s stories contain the multiplicity of dichotomies. There is almost always more than one at play, at any given time. So, Barbie’s childhood dreamland in which she is a hero
needed a villain- another dichotomy. Cuckoo provided that, but it was the need that Cuckoo was able to fill because “(…) She acts according to her nature.” (A Game of You, 164) Gaiman
asks then if that is evil and if Thessaly needs to be killed for wanting to kill Cuckoo? In this
way, the truth turns out to be more complex than a simple hero journey plot, where good and
evil are indeed complete opposites. In a postmodern world, the complete opposites serve to
deliberately disorient in order to point to the imperfect system of hierarchies. Wanda, i.e. Alvin
is the perfect example.
Interwoven in Barbie’s storyline, Wanda, unlike Barbie, knows exactly what she wants.
Wanda is a former southern American boy named Alvin, turned a New Yorker with a “thicker hide” (Game of You, 29) with knee high boots and typical “boy” dreams of superheroes26
whose names indicate they are, like Wanda, mirror images of something else. She quotes to Barbie: “Us do opposite of Earth things in Weirdzo world.” (Game of You, 31). This is again
a kind of play with fixed categories. Wanda continuously tries to convince the reader she is a girl, but leaks little clues like superhero dreams that undermine the “truth” that she is a female.
This is felt particularly strongly when juxtaposed to Cuckoo’s definition of boys’ and girls’
dreams:
26 Here, Wanda talks about Weirdzos from the old Hyperman comics, which are allusions to Bizzaro and
