Greetings all
I've got a little something I'd like to get some peer inspiration on. For a term paper in a literary criticism class I'm in, I proposed writing a paper on Sandman. After some discussion with the teacher, he proposed to compare and contrast it to The Pilgrim's Progress, as both of them are works of allegory. Since The Endless are essentially one big allegory, I'm confident this will work.
If anyone had any thoughts they'd like to contribute to this idea of the Endless as allegorical figures, I'd be most greatful for just about anything. Also, if anyone else has other ideas for ways to compare Sandman to other works in the english literary canon,I'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts.
I hope this doesn't sound like I'm asking people to do my work for me. I'm simply curious to see what people think on the issue.

Pardon me for asking the obvious, but an allegory to what? They're certainly metaphorical, but I really don't see much of an allegory.

The Endless are an allegory or elements of conscious life. As representations of abstractions (Destiny, Death, Dream, you know the rest), given more or less human form, they are allegorical characters. To be technical, they're not metaphoric at all. Metaphors would be comparing them to something, but there's no comparison; they ARE their namesakes.
Though the entirety of the Sandman narrative may not be strictly an allegory, the Endless themselves are allegorical characters. Though, one of the things about allegory is that it implies some kind of moral. I've yet to pin that down, exactly.

An allegorical story would be lord of the rings, or the chronicles of narina, with the source being the story of christ.

The Endless are anthropromorphic personifications of their realms of influence.

To marry these two concepts you need a source, and in the case of the Endless that would be the beings that experience their realms.

When Death or Dream ( or any of the others) are viewed by a being, they take on properties specific to the being viewing them. For example when Bast sees Dream he is cat.Otherwise they are general concepts personified in a more or less fluid state.This could be an allegory for collective unconciousness. The Endless experience change when a paradigm shift occurs and no matter how things change they always stay the same.

some kind of moral...

Depending on how you define what a moral is.

But i'd suggest that its something along the lines of 'to each his purpose'.

All the characters have their roles. None of the major characters is tending to seek dominion over others to a total degree. Death regards herself as servant, even. Fate is not in anyway proactive.

Anyway, the only times characters are condemned is when they step outside their purpose. Look at the Corinthian, for a good example.

Ah, so it's less the story of Dream as an allegory and more Dream as an allegory himself? That I can get behind. (And not LOTR as an allegory, but only because I take Tolkein's word over that of his critics)

It might be interest to talk about the change in the perception of allegory as we see Dream change (by not changing, in some ways) throughout the Sandman narrative.

That would be interesting. As you learn more about Dream and the rest of the Endless, and of their responsibilities, and how they effect, or, as Delirium put it, deform the universe.
I always loved the Corinthian, even if I never totally grasped the significance of his name. He, too, is an allegory. Dream himself describes him as a black mirror of humanity. As a serial killer, he's everything bad and frightening that people are capable of. Frankly, with that kind of expectation heaped on you, you'd think he'd get into politics.
I've still got to somehow link this to another canonical allegory (and no LOTR. I'm talking more like Faerie Queen or Pilgrim's Progress), and then somehow examine the whole thing from the point of view of some school of literary criticism, but at least I'm getting some food for thought. They left this part out of the brochure when I signed up to be a creative writing major...

Are you quite sure allegory is the right term? I thought an allegory was basically a retelling of an old story in a new and interesting way-Lord of the Rings is arguably and allegory for the Second World War, East of Eden is an allegory for part of Genesis, the story of Sisyphus is an allegory for the human condition, that sort of thing. The Sandman seems to me to be a unique, epic tragedy that incorporates and makes mention of other stories, and that Dream is, in a literary sense, at any rate, a metaphor for the dreams of mankind, even if, in the diegesis of the books, he is the physical embodiment of them.

It's not as strict as a retelling of the story. They often tell fables or parables, but an allegory, as a thing, not so much as an entire literary work, is simply the physical representation of an abstract concept. Like an anthropomorphization, only different. Yeah, I've heard all the rumors of an allegorical link between LOTRs and WW2, and personally, I think that's reaching, but it doesn't change the fact it COULD be linked.
The whole narrative of Sandman is definetly epic, though whether it's a real tragedy or not could be a debate all it's own. I don't really think it is. Again, Morpheus isn't a metaphor. He'd be a metaphor if he were, perhaps, dreamy in nature or appearance, but he IS the very embodiment of humanity's subconscious imagination. I don't like being a lit nazi.

This'll be fun! We can each just say the opposite of what the other person says for days and days!

But seriously.
LOTR is undisputably allegorical to World War II. The fact that a reader like me who is reasonably informed about World War II can draw comparisons means that this is the case, regardless of Tolkein's intentions. It's not as easy or direct a comparison as, say, Lord of the Flies, but the allegory is still present.
On the contrariwise, which phrase I have just created to mean exactly what I intend it to mean, regardless of any previous meaning any of the words in it may previously have had, Dream is in many ways a metaphor for dreams and the act of dreaming. Look at his powers. He changes depending on who is experiencing him. In the early story line, he has become trapped in the symbol of the ruby, the same way that we can misunderstand our dreams if our interpretation is too wrapped up in, well, symbols, and when the ruby is destroyed he gains a great deal of power from that destruction, the same way that our dreams gain power when we experience them freely, rather than tying them to symbols we have come to accept. More obviously, even in appearance and behavior, Dream is "dreamy," insubstantial, depending on the artist who draws him. He can open doors. In the last page of Calliope this is very interestingly demonstrated, as Dream gradually fades away from Madoc's memory.
So there. Obvously your arguments are valid, however I would expect to see some textual support for them, were I the one grading your paper. And make sure that you define allegory very carefully. I'd make sure that the person grading your paper agrees with your definition before I went too far were I you, as well.

You're probably right, this could just keep going back and forth. For the record, I didn't end up finding a way to use this for my term paper unfortunately. My teacher was simply too opposed to the use of a contemporary work, and I couldn't wrap this around the other rules for the project. Long story, not very interesting. Anyhow, this is still fun.
While I can't completely deny your use of a metaphor in this case, it still doesn't do justice to the situation. Hitting the ol' dictionary, metaphors are meant to compare two things that are otherwise unrelated. You can't give Dream the qualities of a dream, because he IS a dream. He's Dream. You mentioned his ruby, that could be a metaphor, because a precious gem and godly power are not related.
I still gotta maintain his allegorical status. Being the personafication of all dreams would place his responsibility in the realm of an abstract concept, which is covered by allegory. Dream embodies dreamly traits because that's him, that's who he is. That's what defines his being. All of the Endless are allegorical figures. They represent things that couldn't be described otherwise. They don't embody traits of those things, those things exhibit traits of them. The fact Morpheus can become the dream stuff of others just proves that. You mentioned his appearance, or rather disappearance, in Calliope, but what he did was not metaphoric. He didn't figuratively leave the guy's mind. The drawings simplifying and vanishing is a metaphor for Morpheus' use of power, but the fact remains he IS dream, which allows him to do this.
To further drive my point home, ad nauseum, allegories are often employed in fables and parables in order to present a moral. Sticking to Morpheus for the moment, his tale does contain several morals, the key one becoming most clear during The Kindly Ones. Morpheus defines himself by his responsibilities, but he never had to. He was Dream, but, like Destruction, he could have left at any time he saw fit, but he would have never have allowed himself that. In the end, he learned that he was Dream, and could never be anything but Dream. Along the way, he taught lessons to many other people, as allegories are meant to do. They allow one to confront a concept that could not be dealt with the same way if it were left an abstraction. Take his dealings with Lucifer, when Morpheus went to Hell to get his helmet back. He told the denizens of Hell their oppression would limit them only as far as their immaginations would allow (I'm paraphrasing, of course). He teaches lessons to others, and that's something a metaphor, as a mere figure of speech, couldn't accomplish.

You're right, for the most part, in the diegetic sense: in the diegesis of the story, to say that Dream is a metaphor for dreams is like saying that Daniel Day Lewis is a metaphor for Daniel Day Lewis, although I seem to recall one of the endless telling a character at one point to think of the Endless as symbols.
But we are not in the diegesis of the story: while the story does present a plausible mythology, it also occurs within the DC universe, and we don't have a big city here named Gotham where Batman lives. Regardless of the (awesome) way in which Neil brings us into the story in The Wake, this must be taken as a fictional universe. And in a literary sense, the fact that Dream, the character, embodies many of the aspects of dreaming, the abstract concept, makes him necessarily a metaphor for dreaming. In a literary sense, that is, as in a literal and diegetic sense, as stated earlier, he is, in fact, that concept.
One could go on to make an argument that Neil would probably love that since dreams and comic books are necessarily very different media, any presentation of dreaming in a comic book, or any medium, is necessarily removed from the actuality of dreaming, is presenting something that it can never be. But that would be weird and I just found my Sandman collection again and want to read it. But first one more thing! As long as we're defining things (which in my opinion is cheating in a semantic argument) the OED defines Allegory as follows:
1. Description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance.
2. An instance of such description; a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative, in which properties and circumstances attributed to the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest; an extended or continued metaphor.

So I suppose my original dilemma with the thesis of your paper was exactly what was being described, as the definition puts it, under the guise of the Sandman. Eh? Eh?

Despero said she or he is not doing his or her paper on this anymore. . . but I like the discussion about metaphor and allegory in Sandman.

The clearest overall metaphor I see for the series would be that it's all about storytelling, in a way that the Endless are all the things that people have been telling stories about all this time. Desire, Death, whatever, are the reason we tell stories. Morpheus is often alluded to as the king of stories, and Cane, Abel, Lucien, Eve, and everyone else all exist to keep and tell stories. I say this is a metaphor because--at least in my definition of metaphor--there is a literal and a figurative part; we know the Endless and their interactions with people are the literal part, and I think that the figurative part is that they are personifications of why we tell, retell, reinvent, and listen to stories. Morpheus's overall story arch may not apply, but the fact that more than a third of the series is individual stories makes me believe even more that the series is all about storytelling.

And, when I hear allegory, I immediately think of "Dream of a Thousand Cats," because when I read it for the first time I saw it in purely Marxist terms: trying to get three cats to dream together, let alone a thousand, is impossible, in the same way that the major flaw of communism is that it relies on the cooperation of human beings to work properly.

It really is, fundamentally, a story about stories. You see this the most in World's End, i think, where everyone gets together and embarks on their own storytelling. Focus down, you get the story from Petrifax of the necropolis Litharge. In his story, at the air burial, all the members sit around and tell stories. One tells of his youth, and the old woman and the story she told him of the time she found the room of cerements for the endless. Stories within stories within... etc.

It is about stories, and, in some ways, about the most dreaded question for any author to face: "Where do you get your ideas?" Because they really don't know. So then you get bits like the two Shakespeare tales.

Well, there's two of my cents. Maybe I'll dump in a couple more later. Now I gotsta do homework.

two cents is like, 1/75th of a Choco Taco. Keep going dude!

hey... I already had a choco taco.

Though if we could buy them with literary analyses, I think you and I would be happy, happy clams.

"Had I made a mockery of a culture like the Choco Taco?/Was I to rap as France was to Morocco?/Was I colon rap colon colon France colon, Morocco?"
-MC Paul Barman