Hallucinations vs. Reality

     In “The Sandman,” the main character, Nathanael is torn between hallucinations and reality. He struggles his whole life because of a traumatic episode of the sandman in his childhood experience. My two understandings of this book are that Nathanael does believe there is something or someone controlling his entire life or what Klara said that it something only in his mind that needed to be forgotten. The Coppelius/Coppola character can be considered not as a real physical character, but as a metaphor, it represents the dark side within Nathanael at the very end of the story. As we learned in class, Nathanael represents romanticism while his sister, Klara represents enlightenment by the way she talks about the sandman not being real.