S.

S. is the small provincial town where the young student Nathaniel spent his childhood and where the most decisive events of his life unfolded. It is the setting of his earliest memories, his father's violent death, and the place to which he returns after his catastrophic breakdown, only to meet his end on the town hall tower. The town functions as the geographical anchor of Nathaniel's psychological trauma, the stage on which the boundary between domestic safety and uncanny horror is repeatedly breached.

Identity and Setting

The narrator, struggling to begin his account, considers the opening "In the small provincial town of S. there lived …" as a serviceable, informative start, though he ultimately rejects it in favor of the three letters. S. is never described in detail; it is defined by its ordinariness, a provincial setting that makes the extraordinary events that occur there all the more jarring. It is the home of Nathaniel's family, the place where his mother, his siblings, and later the orphaned Clara and Lothar live under one roof. The town contains the family house with its round table, the father's study, and the hidden laboratory where the alchemical experiments take place.

Childhood Trauma and the Sandman

It is in S. that Nathaniel first encounters the figure he comes to know as the Sandman. The family's evening routine, which ends promptly at nine o'clock with the mother's warning that the Sandman is coming, establishes the town house as the site of a recurring terror. From his childhood bedroom, Nathaniel hears the slow, heavy steps on the stairs and later, at age ten, hides in his father's study to catch a glimpse of the intruder. There he discovers that the Sandman is the barrister Coppelius, a repulsive man with greenish cat's eyes and knotty, hairy fists. In the hidden hearth behind what he had taken for a wall closet, Coppelius works with blue flames and strange instruments, and Nathaniel witnesses a scene in which human faces without eyes appear. Coppelius grabs him, threatens to strew glowing cinders in his eyes, and twists his hands and feet, an assault that leaves Nathaniel with a high fever and weeks of illness. The town house thus becomes the locus of a primal scene of horror, one that fuses the nursery tale of the Sandman with the real, terrifying presence of Coppelius.

The Death of Nathaniel's Father

A year after Coppelius stops visiting, he returns to the house in S. one evening. Nathaniel's mother, pale with fear, recognizes the sound of his steps. His father, with a weak and broken voice, confirms it is Coppelius and promises it will be the last time. That night, a terrible explosion rocks the house; Nathaniel rushes to his father's room and finds him dead on the floor, his face burnt black, his body lying in front of the steaming hearth. The chambermaid cries out, and Nathaniel's mother lies unconscious at his side. Nathaniel himself loses consciousness after crying out, "Coppelius, you cursed Satan, you killed my father!" The neighbors, awakened by the blast, inform the authorities, who issue a warrant for Coppelius's arrest, but he has disappeared without a trace. The town of S. is thus the site of a death that remains officially suspicious but legally unresolved, a trauma that Nathaniel carries with him when he leaves to study in G.

Return and Reconciliation

After his first semester in G., Nathaniel returns to S. to visit his family and his betrothed, Clara. The reunion initially dispels his dark mood; he forgets about Coppelius and Clara's letter, and his upset disappears. But during this visit, his behavior changes. He falls into dark brooding spells, speaks of dark forces and the futility of resistance, and insists that Coppelius is the incarnation of an evil principle. His relationship with Clara deteriorates as he reads her his mystical writings and, finally, a poem in which Coppelius appears at the marriage altar and tears out Clara's eyes. When Clara tells him to throw the "raving — senseless — insane fairy tale into the fire," Nathaniel calls her a "lifeless, accursed automaton" and runs off. This leads to a duel with Lothar, which Clara prevents by throwing herself between them. The three reconcile, and Nathaniel spends three blissful days in S. before returning to G. The town thus serves as the place where his love for Clara is tested and temporarily restored, but also where the rift between his poetic, terror-haunted sensibility and Clara's rational, cheerful nature becomes irreparable.

Final Return and the Tower Incident

After his madness in G., when Olympia is revealed as an automaton and Nathaniel is taken to the madhouse, he awakens in his bed in his father's house in S., with Clara, his mother, and Lothar at his side. He recovers under their care, and the family inherits a small estate from a miserly uncle, planning to move there together. On the day they go shopping in the town, Nathaniel and Clara climb the tall town hall tower in the market square to gaze at the distant mountains. There, Nathaniel mechanically pulls out Coppola's looking-glass and turns it sideways at Clara. The sight triggers a relapse: he cries out, "Turn, little wooden doll, turn!" and tries to hurl Clara off the balcony. Lothar rescues her, but Nathaniel, seeing Coppelius in the crowd below, shrieks "Ha! Eyes a pretty! Eyes a pretty!" and leaps over the parapet, smashing his skull on the cobblestones. The town of S., which had been the site of his childhood home and his recovery, becomes the place of his suicide, the final, irreversible return of the repressed trauma that originated there.