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.
EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary: “Letter I”
Edgar writes this short letter to Sarsefield to warn him in advance of a longer letter that will arrive tomorrow. Clithero is on his way to visit Mrs. Lorimer with “mysterious intentions” (253). Edgar asks Sarsefield to prevent the meeting, and only alludes to his own “rashness” (253) in telling Clithero the details about location.
Epilogue Summary: “Letter II”
This letter from Edgar to Sarsefield is the aforementioned letter with a fuller confession. He notes that Sarsefield is “indifferent” (254) to Clithero’s fate, but he pities Clithero.
Edgar questions Inglefield about Clithero and learns he is staying in Old Deb’s hut and labors on a nearby farm. Hoping to rescue Clithero from his “unsocial and savage” (255) state, Edgar plans to tell him that Mrs. Lorimer is alive and well.
Burdened with memories of the violence he perpetuated there; Edgar enters the empty hut. Clithero returns and doesn’t recognize Edgar at first. Edgar assures him he is a friend and tells him that Euphemia Lorimer is still alive and married to Sarsefield. Clithero makes Edgar swear to this, asks where she lives, and plans to visit this location to see if Edgar is lying. After he runs off Edgar feels embarrassed about revealing her location and concludes that Clithero is, in truth, a “maniac” (258).
Repeating his warning, Edgar knows Sarsefield will “censure” him, but hopes he will also forgive him because he believes he acted on an “impulse” of “benevolence” (259).
Epilogue Summary: “Letter III”
Sarsefield replies to Edgar and relays how his wife almost opened Edgar’s first letter. Unwavering in his belief that Clithero is a “madman,” Sarsefield contacts the chief magistrate (a personal friend of his) and obtains authority to arrest Clithero.
Police wait at the entries to New York, and they capture Clithero and put him on a ship to Pennsylvania Hospital. Sarsefield keeps this information from his wife, but she finds the second letter from Edgar. Reading the letter causes her to have a miscarriage.
Sarsefield condemns Edgar’s “rashness” (260) which went against his dictates and details how the letter could have been sent without the possibility of Euphemia reading it. He then details how Clithero jumps overboard and commits suicide by drowning rather than endure the “noisesome dungeon of a hospital” (261), which was impossible to hide from his wife. Sarsefield’s letter—and the novel—ends with the hope that this death is “the last arrow in the quiver of adversity” (261).
Epilogue Analysis
Ending Edgar Huntly with Sarsefield’s letter is another way of questioning the reliability of the titular narrator. Edgar’s obsession with Clithero leads to rash actions and results in the death of Euphemia’s unborn child; both sleepwalkers are maniacal and untrustworthy. Also, letters are given even more importance in the final section of the novel: the power to kill.
Clithero is not only a foil of Edgar, but also now explicitly aligned with the Native Americans. Edgar describes him as having a “savage” character, and Clithero has chosen to squat in Old Deb’s hut (255).
Mary is no longer addressed directly, nor is her response included; the “epistolary intercourse” (102) is between Edgar, Sarsefield, and (inadvertently) Euphemia. The Waldegrave sister and brother are not mentioned at all in these three letters.
Sarsefield’s voice in the final letter also sounds more literary and controlled than the other narrator’s voices. For instance, his ending metaphor of the “arrow in the quiver of adversity” (261) is more elegant than many passages of Edgar’s “confusion” (31) or Clithero’s conjuration of the “ghost of the past” (55).
