"For what purpose have I come hither? Is it to relate my story?" (669)

Clithero's narrative, which comprises chapters four through eight of Edgar Huntly, provides the backstory which gives the reader insight into Clithero's character. We learn about Clithero's life as a servant who flip-flops from serendipitous fortune to complete emotional destruction. Certainly this story provides a primarily explanatory function, but enough motivation is provided to read into the story that its correct classification is as a low to middle-level dramaturgical relationship. Edgar takes interest in Clithero as a result of this moment of narrative "sharing" and the story subsequently is not quite directly motivated by this episode, however the general sense evoked by the inner narrative changes the plotline.

After Clithero finishes, Edgar becomes the reader who has just heard a story whose validity is surely in question:

But I did not consider this tale merely in relation to myself. My life had been limited and uniform. I had communed with romancers and historians, but the impression made upon me by this incident was unexampled in my experience. My reading had furnished me with no instance, in any degree, parallel to this, and I found that to be a distant and second-hand spectator of events was widely different from witnessing them myself. My judgement was, for a time, sunk into imbecility and confusion. My mind was full of the images unavoidably suggested by this tale, but this existed in a kind of chaos, and not otherwise, than gradually, was I able to reduce them to distinct particulars, and subject them to a deliberate and methodical inspection. (718)

Edgar's search for truth in Clithero's tale, he comes to realize, comes to a standstill when he finds himself unable to associate this fantastic tale into a life which had been "limited and uniform" up to this point. To read it this way, the only sorts of tales that could have the same effect on their reader are those which fall outside the sphere of the ordinary. In her essay "Edgar Huntly and the Novel's Reproductive Disorders," Dana Luciano writes:

In the section of the novel that precedes his fall into the cave-pit, Edgar listens to the life stories of both Clithero and Weymouth. While Edgar tries to play the rational reader by focusing on the "truth" these stories convey - he remarks upon the proofs of Clithero's innocence and the validity of Weymouth's claims on Mary Waldegrave's fortune - the stories themselves nevertheless manage to leak into him, producing an experiential identificationwith the storytellers that takes place despite his stated intentions. (6)

Edgar experiences Clithero's story in a way that mimics the reader's own absorption of Edgar Huntly.

Edgar's reaction to Clithero's narrative seems an allegory of reading a novel such as Edgar Huntly. Indeed, Clithero's story parallels the novel not only in its details but in the struggles that accompany its telling...