Instead of noticing his questions, my soul was harrowed with anxiety respecting the fate of my uncle and sisters. Sarsefield could communicate the tidings which would decide on my future lot, and set my portion in harriness of misery. Yet I had no breath to speak my inquiries. Hope tottered, and I felt as if a single word would be sufficient for its utter subversion. (853)

Sarsefield's story begins midway through chapter 24 of Edgar Huntly and continues until the end of chapter 25. His fortuitous rendez-vous with Edgar allows Sarsefield to recount all the events happening to Edgar's family and friends while during Edgar's time in the forest. Sarsefield's story ends the main letter that constitutes the novel and is followed only by two short correspondences between the two men.

In his essay "Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel," D.A. Miller writes:

For the production of narrative - what we called the narratable - is possible only within a logic of insufficiency, disequilibrium, and deferral, and traditional novelists typically desire worlds of greater stability and wholeness than such a logic can intrinsically provide. Moreover, the suspense that constitutes the narratable inevitably comes to imply a suspensiveness of signification, so that what is ultimately threatened is no less than the possibility of a full or definitive meaning. (272)

While Edgar Huntly certainly is not the traditional novel, the fear of complete significance remained an obstacle to the Gothic cause. Narrative ambiguity often collects at endings for this very reason, because the author needs to finish the story while allowing the reader enough ambiguity to germinate a wide variety of interpretations.

Sarsefield's medical occupation recalls that of Doc Burton in Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, in that his profession inspires questions of objectivity toyed with by the novel. In "'Perverse Nature': Edgar Huntly and the Novel's Reproductive Disorders," Dana Luciano claims that "[Sarsefield] attempts to put an end to these narrative transferences by giving Edgar back his story, albeit in a more complete and more objective form" (6). The embedded narrative therefore serves an explanatory function, the stress on Sarsefield's objectivity seemingly pushes the novel out of literary turmoil and into the competant hands of a doctor, as we see here:

He now withdrew his eyes from me and fixed them on the floor. After a pause he resumed, in emphatic accents. Well, I have lived to this age in unbelief. To credit or trust in miraculous agency was foreign to my nature, but now I am no longer sceptical. Call me to any bar, and exact from me an oath that you have twice been dead and twice recalled to life' that you move about invisibly, and change your place by the force, not of muscles, but of thought, and I will give it. (Edgar Huntly 851)

This classification is complicated, however, by the fact that the novel does climax, to some degree, during the narrative. Sarsefield reveals the information about Huntly's family that plagued him throughout the novel, as well as clearing up several incongruities (the men who shot at Huntly on the rock, for example) from earlier in the story. The embedded narrative has characteristics of, then, a high-level dramaturgical relation with the external story.

Sarsefield's narrative, while presented as a more logical than those of Clithero or Weymouth, is still clouded by ambiguities regarding Huntly's mental conditions, especially those which would hinder him from transcribing exactly what happened. Whenever one can be confident in the reliability of the narrator, the Gothic is sure to weaken the condition of the naratee in order to maintain the level of ambiguity which characterizes the genre. In his essay "Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel," Robert Hume writes that "the writers of Gothic never offer intuitive solutions" (289). Gothic conclusions are constantly blurred by narrative ambiguity precisely of the type seen in the ending sequences of Edgar Huntly.