Charles Brockden Brown’s “Sonambulism: A Fragment” can be viewed as a study in contrasts—in large part, contrasts that highlight life in transition, reflective of a time in US history when people began to embrace individualist ideals. The setting of the story is the American frontier, a place which represents a union of contrasts: of safety and danger, of known and unknown, of civilization and wilderness. In a sense, the setting of the story is also Althorpe’s mind, however—a contradictory place much like the frontier, and one that reveals the struggle between order and chaos, imagination and reason.

The story’s narrator, Richard Althorpe, must live by the rules of society, and at the time, the rules of society revolved around reason and order. Although Althorpe lives by reason and order while awake, however, his unconscious mind takes over when he sleeps. His actions while he is asleep reveal that he is passionate, intellectual, and imaginative. Althorpe restrains these tendencies while awake because he feels forced to conform to social conventions and expectations. Thus, the rift between sleeping and waking represents the clash in society at the time. In the story, Althorpe’s actions in sleep represent an abandonment of the rationalism of the eighteenth century in favor of individual thinking and exploration, which arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century.