I sit down, my friend, to comply with thy request. At length does the impetuosity of my fears, the transports of my wonder permit me to recollect my promise and perform it. At length am I somewhat delivered from suspence and from tremors. At length the drama is brought to an imperfect close, and the series of events, that absorbed my faculties, that hurried away my attention, has terminated in repose. (643)

Letters, both between Edgar and an unnamed female recipient and those involving Sarsefield at the end, serve several functions as narrative devices in the Gothic novel. Edgar's act of letter writing frames the entirety of what follows, and the obvious problems of reliability of narration stem from this formatting choice. In "The Literary Frame," John Frow writes:

As the index of a conventional mode of appropriation of reality, the frame thus corresponds roughly to what George Kubler calls the "self-signal" of a work, its signification of itself as a function with a differential relation to reality. But the difficulty of coping with the concept of frame is the near-invisibility of the frame. We have been taught to naturalize the artificial space of the aesthetic object, to lose ourselves in an inside which is as unlimited as the world, and this means that our "natural" inclication is to see the word in the same way we see the world, without awareness of the edge of our eyes' scan. (337, original emphasis)

Brockden Brown's choice of a "real" frame, to use Frow's language, signals the reader that the relationship between the work and reality is not only undifferentiated but plausible. Edgar, the character that is writing the letter, struggles to no longer be the Edgar Huntly which participates in the adventures that he chronicles. In "'Perverse Nature': Edgar Huntly and the Novel's Reproductive Disorders," Dana Luciano describes Edgar's narrative difficulties as a function of his inability to "separate himself from himself - he cannot stop being - long enough to write" (4).

The primary letter (from Edgar to his correspondent) ends, abruptly, before the novel's page have all been turned. In her book The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes:

Of all the Gothic conventions dealing with the sudden, mysterious, seemingly arbitrary, but massive inaccessibility of those things that should normally be most accessible, the difficulty the story has in getting itself told is of the most obvious structural significance. This difficulty occurs at every level of the novels. A fully legible manuscript or an uninterrupted narrative is rare.... (13-14).

The inability of a story to be completely told is exemplified in Edgar Huntly. Clithero's character is incomplete as described by Edgar, and Sarsefield's letter is necessary to put everything in its right place at the end. The difficulties the story has in getting itself told, as Sedgwick puts it, transcends simple narrative convention in search of a new narrator who can fill in the gaps left by the particular narrator who took us most of the way, but in a typically Gothic fashion, cannot finish.