SOURCE: "Unholy Alliances: Narrative Ambiguity in Tieck's 'Der Blonde Eckbert'," in MLN: Modern Language Notes, Vol. 102, 1987, pp. 608-26.

In the following essay, Tatar examines the narrative structure of Tieck's novella, maintaining that the ambiguity of the text "engages the reader's mind in a never-ending process of interpretation, in an endless search that becomes its own end."

While most authors have at one time or another professed a preference for entertaining or for instructing their readers (unless they have prided themselves on their ability to do both), Ludwig Tieck never really harbored the one ambition or the other. The stated aim of his fiction was to drive readers to the point of distraction, to mystify and bewilder them until they reached that blissful state that Tieck designated by the name "poetic madness." That he very nearly achieved his aim can be verified by virtually any reader of the M...