Sleepwalking In Poe's Somnambulism

On the Internet, you can find all sorts of accounts of people doing some odd things in their sleep. One man creates beautiful pieces of art while he sleepwalks. On the other hand, one man murdered his mother-in-law and attempted to murder his father-in-law while he was sleepwalking. It’s an interesting sleep disorder and the range of behaviors that occur while people are sleepwalking is huge. It can be as simple as just sitting up in bed to things as scary as murdering others. Charles Brockden Brown captures the eeriness of sleepwalking perfectly in his short story “Somnambulism”. It is also the perfect example of an exceptional piece of literature because it meets plenty of the points that Poe refers to in his essay, “The Philosophy of Composition”. Before the narrator even starts to tell the story in “Somnambulism”, Brown inserts a fictitious news article. The news article already summarizes what happens in the story in a short paragraph. The article informs us that,”A young lady, travelling with her father by night, was shot dead upon the road, by some person unknown” (Brown 1). The reader can infer from the title that the young lady was killed by the person suffering from somnambulism. This leads to Poe’s first point in his essay. He writes, ”Nothing is more

Like the tone, they are all dark. The most prominent would have to be the case of a situation like a doppelganger. Young Althorpe and Nick Handyside are the same person, but Nick Handyside is just what the townsfolk call this mysterious man who is actually Young Althorpe sleepwalking. Dopplegangers are usually seen as the evil version of someone, but in this case they are the same person, one side of him is just conscious of his actions and the other is not. In “Philosophy of Composition”, Poe refers to his poem “The Raven”. The raven helps portray the theme and tone of sadness and death. In Brown’s short story, Nick Handyside portrays the theme and tone of