Significance of Childhood in the development of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, The Sandman, and Pan’s Labyrinth Anastasia Zadoinova College

Childhood affects one’s creativity and enables the activity of lively imagination. However, the upbringing plays a central role to the development of those qualities. On the one hand, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and The Sandman are narratives that portray childhood influences as major aspects of the unravelling of the particular stories. On the other hand, Pan’s Labyrinth is a film that represents childhood as a potential door into the world of the fantastic. All three works are considered from the realm of fantasy and are shaped according to the character’s past or present childhood experiences. Consequently, one can argue that childhood is of a major significance in the development of fantastic narratives.

To start with The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, the reader notices from the very beginning that Alphonse attempts to live by the ‘rules’ imposed to him by his family, and mostly his father, “I was bound by the sacred laws of honour to take the shortest route to Madrid without considering whether it was the most dangerous” (Potocki, 3). It seems that honour was almost demanded to be a quality that Alphonse should posses with any cost. Those two lines also indicate that if Alphonse’s upbringing would not be as strict...