Due to the novel’s unfinished stage, the reader will be confronted with the problem of interpreting the meaning of a literary creation which leaves certain questions unanswered and actually has no conventional ending, since the author died abruptly with just half of the planned work published.

Through the close reading of the fragment and the aid of the critical response it will be discussed if the last Dickens’s piece of writing can be regarded as a complete text notwithstanding its incomplete framework.

Charles Forsyte re-read the book to infer the development of the plot through some clues in the text and merged the accounts of those who claimed to have been told directly by Dickens about the fate of the young engineer who disappeared mysteriously on a Christmas Eve.

The closing section examines the relationship between the Victorian novel and a modern attempt to continue the story of Edwin Drood to provide the book with an ending.

By means of comparison of the thematic and stylistic choices, along with the narratological devices, it will be pointed out that such literary experiment, despite offering a plausible solution to the mysteries in the story, actually fails to grasp and carry on the richness of Dickens’s last fictional enterprise.

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