In Charles Brockden Brown's novel, Edgar Huntly or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799), many characters have problems interpreting their own ideas about reality and what which is actually real in the context of the novel. Edgar Huntly's often inaccurate perception of reality causes many of the novel's key events to occur. There are several examples of these fallacies throughout the novel, including the assumption that Clithero is Waldegrave's murderer, that Native Americans killed Huntly's uncle and sisters, and that Clithero is innocent of any malicious intent towards Sarsefield and his wife. Brown places his protagonist and other characters within this confusing concept of reality to illustrate how humanity's perception of itself and one man's ideas about one another are often subjective and imperfect, not universal truths at all. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Edgar's unreliability as a narrator is in no way accidental. Readers often begin a story with complete trust in the narrator until the narrator demonstrates that this trust is unwarranted. This is the case with Edgar: even if he doesn't seem to have malicious intentions, he often perceives things as true that aren't. As the reader gains insight into his mind and thought process, it is easy to determine that Edgar's decisions are made solely based on what he believes to be true and not for his own malicious reasons. However, what he considers to be truth is often his drawing hasty conclusions, which inspires him to act, usually with dire consequences for both himself and others. When Edgar finds his gun among the Native Americans, he assumes that his entire family must be dead and that the Indians stole the gun from his manor before destroying it. He observes: “I needed no more incontestable proof of my calamity than this. My uncle and sisters had been murdered; the house had been ransacked, and this had been a part of the looting” (178). Yet in reality only Edgar's uncle died; the land, house and sisters had not been damaged. Edgar, however, assumes the worst, and this helps him justify his actions by killing every Native American he encounters. Once he learns the truth, however, he does not pay much attention to the fact that his assumptions in this case deceived him, nor does he wonder about other cases in which he may have assumed something that ultimately turned out to be false. Edgar not only has flawed ideas. on reality when considering others, but often also seems not to know the truth about himself, both physically and mentally. There are several examples of this tendency throughout the novel. For example, when Edgar fails to find the letters he hid from Waldegrave, instead of realizing that he is the only person who has access to the place where these letters are kept and therefore that he is the cause of their disappearance, he becomes convinced that someone else stole these papers that are so important to him (128). Once again, the reader is led into Edgar's misperception of himself when he wakes up in the cave: he has no idea who brought him here, leaving his body bruised and aching, and leaving him to starve (154) . In reality, Edgar has arrived at this place because of his own bout of sleepwalking, although he does not realize that this is a condition he suffers from until Sarsefield tells him so at the end of the novel. Throughout the story, Edgar continually tries to convince himself that he is the victim of someone else's madness, when often he is the one responsible for it.