45 pages • 1 hour read
Charles Brockden BrownEdgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1799A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary
Edgar swims along the bank of the river, unable to find something to cling to or pull himself out of the water. Edgar finds a pine with a low-hanging branch and uses this to pull himself to land. There is no road on this side of the river, but there are farms; Edgar walks to a house and finds an unlocked kitchen door; he enters and sees a semi-extinguished house fire in the middle of the room. As the last of the fire dies, Edgar seeks out the tenants, and a drunk man stumbles out of bed and falls on the floor.
Edgar tries the barn and finds the man’s infant and wife. He recalls stories about a family named Selby and guesses this is their residence. Not wanting to further upset the crying baby and mother, Edgar leaves as quietly as possible to seek aid at another house. Along the path from the Selby house, he finds the scalped and “mangled” body of a girl and suspects the “savages” (211) started the fire as well. Creeping around, Edgar discovers the body of a dead Native American nearby and steals the corpse’s musket.
Chapter 23 Summary
Following the roads, Edgar finds a ford in the river and contemplates crossing toward Solesbury. He sees a “clown” from Bisset’s “gristmill” and questions him about the Native Americans. The man tells him that many were killed, a girl was captured (and “retaken”), and one house in his neighborhood was burned, but the man doesn’t know whose house. Edgar decides that it is his uncle’s house and the “retaken” captive is his sister. These assumptions compel him to cross the river and head toward Inglefield’s.
Along the path, Edgar sees Inglefield’s neighbor’s mansion has a light on and decides to stop there. He contemplates his appearance—a body covered with “bruises and scarifications” (216) as well as a “ghastly” face—and worries they won’t recognize him. Finding the door of the mansion is open and the house is empty, Edgar warms himself by the fire and searches for the tenants. After knocking at each door and finding most of them locked, he enters the guest room that still has the light on. He finds a writing desk for travel and Waldegrave’s letters lying beside the desk. Edgar wonders how this travelling stranger obtained the letters, and Sarsefield enters.
Chapter 24 Summary
Edgar hugs Sarsefield and sobs, but his tutor doesn’t immediately recognized him; Sarsefield questions if he’s “dreaming” because it seems as if Edgar has “twice been dead and twice recalled to life” (220). Sarsefield reveals he saw Edgar—and thought he was dead—at Old Deb’s hut and in the river. Edgar realizes the men in the gunfight at the river were his friends and neighbors.
Edgar also learns that his sisters are alive, his uncle’s house has not been burned, but his uncle died in pursuit of him. Still curious about how Native Americans ended up with his musket, Edgar answers Sarsefiled’s questions about his journey, recapping (once again) the previous action.
Sarsefield then relays his side of the story. He says he wrote to Edgar but is unsure what happened to his letters; in them, he tried to inform Edgar that he and his now-wife (Mrs. Lorimer) were coming to America. The “silence” in response to these letters inspires Sarsefield to hasten to Solesbury, where he sees Edgar sleepwalking at a distance, but doesn’t wake him.
The following morning, Sarsefield realizes that Edgar is missing, and with Edgar’s uncle, he concludes that Edgar had been sleepwalking on more than one occasion. They form a search party but are interrupted with the news about the Native American attacks, and Edgar’s uncle takes his musket, while his sisters are sent to Inglefield’s.
Chapters 22-24 Analysis
In Chapter 23, Sarsefield enters Edgar’s main narrative; in previous chapters, he is a figure in both Clithero’s and Edgar’s reflections on the past. However, Sarsefield reveals that he has been present in previous chapters—at Old Deb’s hut in Chapters 18 and 19 and during part of the river gunfight in Chapter 21. He is the saner foil for Edgar—complete with a desk that characterizes him as part of “no vulgar order” (218). Sarsefield even asks his old student, “Huntly [...] are you mad?” (222).
The presence of Sarsefield’s counter-narrative illuminates Edgar’s unreliability. In this section, we see how far off the sleepwalker’s assumptions are from details that can be corroborated. For instance, Edgar doesn’t think the captive girl Bisset’s “clown” mentions is the girl he rescued, but instead his sister. This calls into question the details Edgar tells (and retells) in other chapters that can’t be corroborated.
Rediscovering Waldegrave’s letters for Edgar makes the “miracles of poetry, the transitions of enchantments […] beggarly and mean” (218). Sarsefield also remarks on the lost letters from Chapter 9; he did, eventually, send letters to Edgar. Edgar hides papers from himself while sleepwalking and misses correspondence because of his sleepwalking.
There are a few other minor characters, mostly unnamed or only given a family name, introduced in this section. The drunken Selby and “coarse” Bisset are white neighbors of Edgar but blur the line between civilized and “savage” (213). Edgar portrays them as a potential threat, like the Native Americans, but more approachable than the local tribes.
Blurred identity also applies to Edgar; one of the few fears he expresses that turns out to be true is that he will not be recognized because of his appearance. His adventures in nature have injured him, and sleepwalking has left him half-naked (like Clithero); Sarsefield wonders if he is an “apparition or imposter” (220).
