Edgar Huntly or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker

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The novel begins with the letter that Edgar is writing to his fiancée Mary in which he explains to her his endeavour to locate the murderer of his friend, after which he sets out on his mission. He goes for a walk around the site where Waldegrave's body was found and there, for the first time, sees Clithero whom he describes as “ a figure, robust and strange, and half naked“ , immediately recognizing him as something opposite than himself and everyone around him. After a conversation with him, which seemed more like an interrogation, Edgar begins to empathize with Clithero and as he runs away into the forest, Edgar follows. He is threatened and in awe of this man's ability to find his way through the wilderness and suddenly a sense of rivalry arises in Edgar which turns into pure competition. Consequently, Edgar's inexplicably drawn to the character . He finds him in a cave resembling a madman, a savage, a barbarian: "His grey coat, extended claws, fiery eyes, and a cry which he at that moment uttered, and which, by its resemblance to the human voice, is peculiarly terrific, denoted him to be the most ferocious and untamable of that detested race" . At the entrance of the cave, a panther appears as a symbol of Clithero's transformation into a primal, animalistic creature. That night, Edgar experiences sleepwalking for the first time and a sequence of occurrences begins which leads him deeper into the wilderness of the forest, as well as the wilderness of his identity. What comes next is a scene of Edgar waking up at the bottom of a dark pit in which he fell while sleepwalking. He wakes up to find himself almost entirely naked, covered in blood and with no sign of civilization whatsoever. As he succeeds to crawl out of the pit, he ... ... middle of paper ... ...s a metaphor of the gloomiest corners of his psyche that open up only when he loses complete control over his mind and body. His senses appear far more acute when he is dreaming, the percepton of the wilderness through his impressions grows stronger and together with it grows his sense of liberty and existence. “The mysteries of the forest ultimately prove to be the mysteries of one's own identity. The amount of secrecy one encounters in external reality is comparable in extent to the submerged areas of one's being. Somnambulism is the final phase of this deterioration, for to be a somnambulit is to live, paradoxically, outside one's impulses and actions while at the same time being a part of them... Though he feels equally unplaced and enveloped by fear, the things surrounding him appear to have greater firmness, weight, and presence than he experiences elsewhere.“

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