Sandman musings: Why Daniel?

[alexxkay]

I was musing last night over the thematic arc of Neil Gaiman's _The Sandman_, when a new question occurred to me: Why choose Daniel as his 'successor'?

One of the obvious character arcs that Morpheus undergoes over the course of the series is a growing sense of compassion and responsibility towards others. So why pick, as the major changed piece of his personality, such a young human child? A child of that age is practically the polar *opposite* of those qualities! It's almost as if Morpheus is rejecting the changes he has undergone, and deliberately attempting to undo them.

One of Daniel's other qualities is that his parents have had their back-continuity rewritten multiple times. This also suggests that, by absorbing him, Morpheus wishes to rewrite his own past, eliminating the parts he doesn't want to cope with any more.

The catalytic event which started Morpheus changing was his imprisonment in a round glass cage for an unusually long time. Daniel spent an unusually long time inside the round 'cage' of his mother's womb, itself effectively imprisoned within the round confines of the Dream Dome. Perhaps Daniel, being such a child of confinement, is more resilient to it, and wouldn't undergo such change if subjected to it.

While one of the major repeating theme's in Sandman is "You don't have to stay anywhere (or any*one*) forever", it now looks to me like Morpheus's choice is explicitly a rejection of change, a conservative retrenching. I wonder if that was in any way intentional on Gaiman's part?

Comments

[kestrell.livejournal.com]

I see Daniel as, through both his youth and his possible absorption of having the backstory of his parents rewritten so many times, as pointing toward the possibility of being more open about interpreting dreams and more resilient or even resistent to control. If someone attempts to imprison him and control the dream, Daniel has the still-unformed oepn possibilities of youth to just slip away and dream the dream differently.
The mode in which adults learn lessons doesn't always imbue the intuitive knowing that children possess; adults have to work at thinking outside the box, children just pick up the box and turn it into a transmogriphier (sorry about the spelling errors, my browser is going woncky, ormaybe it is Jaws).

[idonotlikepeas]

I think the main point about Daniel was just that he was human, and that he was relatively unformed clay. Morpheus seemed to want someone who could look at things from a different perspective, and who was capable of change, and those are both things that describe children precisely.