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 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Edgar relates that he remembers sleeping but not sleepwalking, and awakes disoriented, in pain and darkness, without his shoes and stockings. Once he realizes he isn’t blind, but in a cave, Edgar feels around and finds an “Indian tomahawk” (155). Walking along the walls, he discovers he is in a pit with no exit at ground level, and he guesses he is in Clithero’s cave again (in truth, he is many miles away). After some immeasurable amount of time has passed, Edgar’s becomes so hungry that he eats a bit of his shirt and contemplates suicide-by-tomahawk.
Before giving in to suicidal urges, Edgar tries to climb out of the pit. The walls are smooth, but he finds a way up, and at the top sees a panther. Edgar throws the tomahawk, kills the panther, and drinks its blood, which makes him sick. After recovering and napping, Edgar is thirsty. He follows sounds that could be from a stream, but finds no water, and drinks his sweat. The sounds return, and Edgar follows them again, but they lead to a man-made fire at the entrance of the cave.
Chapter 17 Summary
As Edgar approaches the fire, he sees four sleeping figures and identifies them as “Indians” by their “moccasins” and being otherwise “adorned in a grotesque manner” (164). The sleepers lay next to their guns, and Edgar finds a hiding place. Edgar is “haunted” by the murder of his parents and an infant during the “former Indian Wars” (165) in Norwalk. Edging closer to the fire, Edgar sees a Native American sitting on watch, and shrinks back into his hiding spot. The watchman leaves the cave, and Edgar discovers a young girl who the Native Americans have tied up.
Edgar hopes to escape and bring back aid for the captive. Making eye contact with the girl, Edgar gestures for silence and steals a musket and hatchet. He leaves the cave and discovers a waterfall and the watchman between him and escape. Contemplating shooting the Native American, Edgar reminds the reader of his parents’ murder but is “not certain but that these very men were the assassins of my family” (169). He hesitates to commit murder (reasoning the sound of the gun would alert the other Native Americans), and tries to retreat to his hiding place. However, the watchman gets up and walks toward Edgar, who kills him with the hatchet. He believes this to be an act of self-defense, and in this extreme circumstance, his “muscles would have acted almost in defiance of my will” (170). Edgar is remorseful.
Chapter 18 Summary
Free from the cave and captors, Edgar decides to return for the girl. He slips past the sleepers, steals another hatchet, and cuts her bonds. She can barely walk, so Edgar helps her down the hill.
The scene is “wild and desolate”: stoney soil and trees that hold no “marks of habitation or culture” (173). Edgar tries to question the girl, who reveals the Native Americans killed her family. During their travels, they nearly fall into a pit, getting entangled by oak branches, and must change direction when coming to a bog or brook.
Eventually, they find a field and house; the tenant is away, so they enter, kindle a fire, and dine on the tenant’s bread. The girl falls asleep in a bed, and Edgar stays awake, examining the gun he stole. He discovers that it is his musket, a gift from Sarsefield, that he left in his closet. This discovery, coupled with the memories of his murdered parents, causes Edgar to believe the Native Americans killed his uncle and sisters. He wonders if he was dragged to the cave. Now he considers killing the watchman “necessary vengeance” (177) and considers returning to the cave to kill the rest of them in this vengeful spirit .
Edgar looks through a crack and sees the other Native Americans approaching the hovel. He tries to find a good defensive position in the hovel but knocks out the oven and sinks into a “sand-bank” (179). The Native Americans enter and see the girl, while Edgar hides behind the bank and waits to shoot them as they leave the house. The sound of a heavy stroke and a shriek issue from the house. When one man emerges, dragging the girl by her hair, Edgar shoots him dead. Another man follows, and Edgar kills him as well.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
This section includes the fictional captivity narrative: Native Americans have stolen a girl that a white man must save. Edgar’s perpetuation of violence against the “savage” men is foreshadowed by his killing of a “savage” panther. Both Native Americans and big cats are part of the “wild” landscape. The unnamed girl could stand in for any captive in the genre. She does foil Edgar in her loss of parents because of violence between Native Americans and white settlers, but her character isn’t as developed as Edgar’s. He is “haunted” by the trauma of his loss and seeks vengeance. Trauma, rather than Edgar, becomes the author of violence through passive voice, e.g., “The hatchet buried itself in his breast” (170).
In addition to hatchets and tomahawks, Edgar’s musket is a focalization of this violence; gifted between major white characters, its Native ownership is justification for Edgar’s shifting morality. His character and narration is again questionable; at the beginning of Chapter 16, he says “fortune, in her most wayward mood, could scarcely be suspected of an influence like this” and admits his tale will be “intelligible” (153).
The “Indian Wars” refer to several conflicts around the period of the Revolutionary War. The year cited in the text as the time in which the narrative occurs is 1787, when the Northwest Indian War began (which is a little further west than Norwalk, but many similar conflicts predated it in Pennsylvania).
This section not only includes another Poe-like “pit,” but also a Jungian rebirth for Edgar in the underground cave that is dozens of miles from his uncle’s home. After his pseudo-death of sleepwalking, he is able to bring death to other humans in his personal heroic narrative.
