OKAY SO THIS WAS IN MY ESSAY, AND I JUST CUT IT RIGHT OUT. It was turning into too much of an unsupported conspiracy, which probably came out of bits and pieces from seminar, but I spent time on it so I’m putting it here
Perhaps not quite within “inner vision”, but when Nathanael looks through the spyglass that he bought from Coppola the glassmaker, he sees thing that may be questionable to reality.Though spyglass are usually associated with the ability to see more clearly, it seems that this particular spyglass serves the opposite function. When looking through the glass, Nathanael sees a distortion of reality, and perhaps even what Coppelius/Coppola wants him to see. The first time he uses it is when he looks at Olimpia, and falls in love with her. Perhaps it was Coppola’s intention to have Nathanael become attached to the automaton, as he is involved in the aforementioned situation in which Olimpia loses her eyes. The next time we see this glass, Nathanael has awoken from his supposed madness, until he notices the glass in his pocket. As soon as he takes a look at Clara through it, he is spewing madness, and accusing her of being an automaton and trying to kill her. Before his death, he sees Coppola’s figure, laughing. If we assume that everything Nathanael sees is actually real, it is plausible that Coppola is intentionally creating these situations for the sake of scaring him.
I don’t know if one would be making too much of a conspiracy theory by saying these things, only because the story itself invites such conspiracy theories. We are invited to think of Coppelius as a menacing figure who is returning to torment Nathanael later, in the guise of Coppola, and then at the very end when N. sees him and kills himself. So honestly, I don’t think this is going too far!
I think it makes sense to suggest that the spyglass that Nathanael buys from Coppola provides him with what Coppola/Coppelius wants him to see; it certainly distorts his vision in some sense, and he does buy it from Coppola. Now, here’s a problem with just lifting a paragraph from your essay and putting it into a blog post: you justify the interpretation that the spyglass may show N what Coppola wants to see, by referring to something “aforementioned,” but readers of the blog don’t know what that is! So I’m not quite seeing the reason why we might think Coppola wants N to become attached to Olimpia, as described in this paragraph here.
We could go even further, maybe: Coppelius wants to take Nathanael’s eyes in the scene of N’s childhood. Maybe metaphorically he does: what Nathanael sees after the first visit from Coppola is just gloominess and fear of Coppelius/Coppola; that is clouding his vision, so to speak. And then when he buys the spyglass and looks through it, he sees things in a different way, through a different “eye”: perhaps Coppelius “steals his eyes” in that sense–he makes N see things differently.
These are just some thoughts I had while reading your post!
Yeah, I sort of posted this in a fit of rage, so I didn’t edit it much ahaha sorry. If I end up doing this again (which I hopefully wont