xperience of the Sandman as the mysterious late-night caller, Dr. Coppelius, who visited his father with some regularity after the children had been put to bed and whose physical ugliness, one comes to understand, was against him. "Here comes the Sand-man," Nathanael's mother would say, referring to the children's bed time. However, in Nathanael's mind that reference became fused with the largely invisible visitor, particularly when Nathanael stole a look at the gentleman caller and was frightened by his grotesque appearance. Nathanael is no less frightened when, years later, he again encounters the apparition and becomes obsessed with Coppelius's activity.
The fear has tenuous connection to fact. Nathanael's father was indebted to a lawyer named Coppelius, who was dishonest and physically repulsive but (like Nathanael's father) an alchemist-inventor. Coppelius used to visit Nathanael's father because the two men worked on a project together, always after the children had been put to bed. Nathanael is obsessed with the idea that his father's accidental death was actually a murder. Nathanael sees--his one correct perception--the Coppola who appears in his village as Coppelius, but he mainly clings to the fantasy of Coppelius as the dreaded "Sandman" of his childhood who murdered his father.
In "The Sand-Man," Hoffmann initially draws the reader into Nathanael's fantasy, presenting his self-assessment as the musings of an intellectual but imaginative personality. But the commonsense commentary of Clara, his betrothed, provides early clues that Nathanael's conflict is in his mind and that as a matter of fact he cannot trust his perceptions any more than the reader should trust them. His sentient experience misleads him because he misinterprets it.
I will admit straight out [Clara says] that in my opinion all the terrible things you speak of happened only within your own mind and that the outer world had very little part in them. O...