Authors as "Good Portrait Painter"s

One of the metaphors that struck me in "The Sandman" was the connection between narrators and painters. They make characters "recognizable even if the original is unknown to you." This imagery was particularly intriguing because I had never fully understood authors as artists. Instead of colors they use words to create striking images of their characters. Descriptions are used to illustrate people that technically don't exist. An author's job is to make you believe in and even see these people you have never met or may not even exist. These images that we get in our heads about particular characters are influenced by what type of narrator we have been given. In "The Sandman", we are faced with a first person narrator that does not reveal his connection to our main characters but seems to have intimate knowledge of everything that is going on. The paintings in our heads are all based on this ambiguous figure's opinions. This imagery particularly reminds me of when people watch movies and say that the characters aren't what they imagined them to be at all. The movies are making different paintings than the ones the authors have formed in our heads with their beautiful words and phrases.