I finally finished it. Holy shit.
I don't have especially coherent thoughts on the subject yet, but I'm seeing some motifs in Gaimen and Moore's work that I like. First, both of them like to embrace the uncertain. Withink Miracleman, we'll never really know how Miracleman and the Warpsmith beat Kid Miracleman because, instead of an explanation, we get several different versions of what might have happened, based on theories invented after the fact by historians and the religious. Unfortunately, Moore did write an adventure in Warrior that contains what 'really' happened (damnit), but I prefer the version in which that intertextual adventure is unknown, and we merely acknowledge a bunch of interpretations.
In Sandman, however, we'll genuinely never know who killed Morpheus. There's a wonderful site that's part of the Gaiman Archive that attempts to at least profer all the valid theories as to Who Killed Morpheus?, and the most likely theory seems obvious (Morpheus needed to change, so he engineered his owh 'death' in order for Dream to become someone new, someone capable of change on a less radical basis), but we'll never really know, and that's so much more fun than a difinitive answer.
A prof once used the phrase "Notable by its absence is..." in referen to Othello, and the phrase has stuck with me. The lack of a difinitive answer is a narrative element in and of itself. Not having that nice solid answer has a clear effect on readers. It involves them in interpreting and analysing the story, and doing so on a continual basis because they can never really 'solve' the problem, since there is no solution.
That's the other motif, stronger in Gaiman than Moore, but also in both. Gaiman seems to really like pulling readers into the story. During Morpheus' funeral, the narration, unattributed but definately friendly and familiar, says that many have come to mourn for him, including "you." The story takes place in the Dreaming, and is the dream of thousands of people, including cameos by just about every character in the series, but dreams stand for stories, in Sandman, so the reader is also 'dreaming' this tale, in that metaphorical sense. We're righ there with the dreamers. They've been pulled into that world without their permission.They're just dreaming. The reader, however, is doing it voluntarily. Other than that, though, they're the same. We're reading and they're dreaming and the two are equivalent in that story.
As I say, I don't have coherent thoughts yet. I'll need a second read-through before I can really start to have calculated analysese to talk about because there's just so much going on. It's 75 bloody issues!
Posted by orion at August 10, 2005 2:55 PM | TrackBack