From Morpheus to McShane: On the Power of Story and the Tragedy of Expectation

With the bonus episode of The Sandman set to premiere today (July 31), I’ve been reflecting on the second season and how well the adaptation captures what I remember most from the original comics — even though it’s been years since I last read them. What’s stayed with me all this time isn’t the plot points or even the characters, but the central thesis that stories are powerful — that they define our lives, give shape to our identities, and help us make meaning out of loss.

While I thought the adaptation was quite good overall — well-acted, beautifully crafted, and often moving — it leaned more into a familiar hero’s journey: a cold, distant being learning to love, to let go, to change. What it didn’t fully capture, at least for me, was that deeper, stranger, more resonant idea: that we are the stories we tell, and sometimes the ones we inherit. That’s what made the original work linger. And oddly enough, it’s the same idea I’ve been exploring through my own writing — just in a more grounded, human context.

At first glance, The Sandman and The Wake of Expectations/A Pleasant Fiction duology couldn’t seem more different. One is a sweeping dark fantasy rooted in mythology, dream logic, and cosmic archetypes. The other is a grounded, emotionally honest work of autofiction, told through the coming-of-age story of one boy struggling to define himself against the backdrop of family, culture, and disappointment and then grappling with what it means to be a man reckoning in the aftermath.

But for all their stylistic differences, both are ultimately concerned with the same haunting truth:

The stories we inherit — and the ones we tell ourselves — shape everything.

And unless we consciously rewrite them, they will define us.

The Mythic vs. The Mundane

Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is often remembered for its dreamlike structure and gothic aesthetic. But the core of its power lies not in its fantasy elements, but in its meditation on narrative identity. Morpheus — the anthropomorphic personification of Dream — is not just a god of sleep. He is the embodiment of story, imagination, and self-definition. And that turns out to be a prison.

Throughout the comic, characters orbit around the central question:

Are we free to become something new, or are we bound by the roles we've been given?

The answer, in Morpheus’s case, is tragic. He cannot change without destroying himself. His arc is not one of redemption, but of resignation. In the final volume, titled The Wake, Morpheus is mourned not just as a being, but as a myth — and his death is the moment his story finally ends and becomes fixed. It’s only then that others are free to interpret, reflect, and retell.

Calvin McShane’s journey in The Wake of Expectations and A Pleasant Fiction is grounded in the same existential bind — but transposed to the deeply personal and painfully human.

Living in the Wake

The title The Wake of Expectations carries a double meaning. On the surface, it implies living in the aftermath — the turbulence left behind by other people’s hopes, demands, and stories. But it also implies mourning. Like a funeral wake, Calvin’s life is haunted by the death of other people’s versions of him—and other versions he himself aspired to or imagined.

What begins as a story of adolescent pressure and cultural constraint slowly reveals itself to be a meditation on narrative legacy. Calvin isn’t just trying to live — he’s trying to figure out whose story he’s in. His parents have one version. His church has another. His friends, teachers, girlfriends, and ghost-like selves each hold different drafts of his identity. (And, of course, he himself imagines multiple competing versions of his own.)

And by the time we reach A Pleasant Fiction, it’s clear that Calvin’s arc diverges from Morpheus’s in a crucial way. Dream is bound by his function as an Endless, trapped in a story that will only release him through death. Calvin has no supernatural role to escape — but he is still bound by the weight of other people’s stories about him: who he should be, what a life should mean, how grief should end. His act of resistance is not transcendent but human: he doesn’t destroy himself to escape his story. He painstakingly rewrites it, draft by imperfect draft, until it becomes something he can finally live with.

Stories as Salvation and Burden

In both The Sandman and The Wake of Expectations, stories are everything:

• They provide structure in a chaotic world.

• They define meaning after death and loss.

• But they can also trap us in roles that no longer serve who we are becoming.

Morpheus is majestic, ancient, powerful — and yet, in the end, powerless to escape the story he was created to embody. Calvin, by contrast, is ordinary. But his power lies in the deeply human act of confronting the stories imposed upon him — and choosing which ones to keep.

In A Pleasant Fiction, that process becomes especially poignant. Calvin has lost nearly everything. He sifts through grief, memory, and disappointment not to find answers, but to shape meaning through the act of telling. Like The Wake, the narrative becomes a retrospective. Not a triumphant epilogue, but a quiet reckoning.

Coincidence — or Echo?

That the final volume of The Sandman is titled The Wake, and that Calvin McShane’s saga opens with The Wake of Expectations, is almost certainly coincidence. But it’s also a fitting one. Both titles signal an end — a loss, a mourning, a moment of truth-telling.

And in both works, the wake is not just what follows the story.

It is the story — the part where meaning takes shape, where identity is reconciled, and where the possibility of freedom quietly emerges.

Final Thoughts

While The Sandman takes us through dreams and myths and the gods who govern them, The Wake of Expectations offers a mirror in the real world — a young man trying to escape not an archetype, but a narrative forged by others.

Both ask us to consider:

• Whose story are you living?

• Are you writing it — or just playing your part?

• And if you're mourning a life you thought you were supposed to have... what meaning will you choose to make from that wake?

The answers, like the stories themselves, are never simple.
But they matter more than anything.

Javier

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