Edgar Huntly

Brown’s use of describing the sensations and thoughts that Edgar Huntly is experiencing can be used to describe the scenery in the majority of the text so for me it was hard to pick one specific point in the novel. Page 154 however, did stick out to me because I am slightly claustrophobic and if this ever happened to me I would totally freak out. The last paragraph really grasps how the wilderness is a threat without actually depicting the scenery in detail. I of course understood he was trapped in a cave of some sort, but the reader knows more about Edgar’s delusions and fears than the cave itself. “I existed as it were in a wakeful dream. With nothing to correct my erroneous perceptions, the images of the past occurred in capricious combinations, and vivid hues.” He entertains the idea that some tyrant had thrust him into a dungeon. I know he is in the cave in the wilderness, but the thought of the dungeon after the previous statement makes the place seem cold and dark and eerie. At the top of page 155 he then mentions the thought of having been buried alive. You can really sense how frightening and lonely the cave is from this idea and the reader begins to wonder as Edgar does himself, that he might be left there to die. I believe an author oriented toward the picturesque might not have captured the fear or the terror Edgar experiences at that moment. The author would be more about the caves stone walls, the color of the ground, or describing the darkness in a more literal sense rather than describing as Brown did. Further down the same page it reads, “There is no standard by which time can be measured, but the succession of our thoughts, and the changes that take place in the external world.” From this sentence alone I feel like the cave is deep and dark and cut off from the world. I felt a tremendous sense of isolation from this piece in the reading than if I had read something along the lines of, “the cave walls were impossible to measure in height and all was very dark.” I would argue that the book would have lost a lot of its intensity had it been written in a more picturesque way. I think describing the character’s reaction towards the environment allows the reader to feel what the character is feeling and fear what the character fears whereas if it had been described in a more visual sort of way I might have thought Edgar was a wimp and should just crawl out of the stupid cave.