Charles Brockden Brown

Edgar Huntly Charles Brockden Brown

Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is a 1799 novel by the American author Charles Brockden Brown. In the novel, both Clithero and Huntly are sleepwalkers, although at the beginning of the book Huntly does not realize it. Sleepwalking is prevalent in the story, and Brown uses this device to drive the plot of the novel. For example, Huntly first notices Clithero while Clithero is sleepwalking near the Elm tree. This is what leads Huntly to investigate into Clithero's activities further, and why Huntly accuses Clithero of killing Waldegrave. It is while Huntly is following a sleep-walking Clithero that he first comes to the cave, which plays a major role in the plot. The entire second half of the novel revolves around the travelings of Huntly as he tries to return home; this occurs because Huntly wakes up in the bottom of a cave which he entered into by sleep-walking. Waldegrave's papers also mysteriously disappear, but later the reader learns that they were misplaced by Huntly during the night. Because Huntly was sleepwalking while he did this, he has no recollection of the events and the missing papers are therefore a great concern to him. At the end of the novel, Huntly no longer has troubles with sleepwalking.