The Man of the Crowd, by Edgar Allan Poe

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“The man of the crowd” which was written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, is a tale that awakens the curiosity of the reader and implants vivid images of the walking people alongside the coffee shop where the narrator is sitting. The narrator gains our trust from the beginning of the story, and naively walks us through the streets of London for a full day, doing something that is considered wrong, stalking an old man, just out of a sick minded curiosity to know his deepest secrets. He does that after generally analyzing the crowd at first, and classifying them into different groups and then he gradually focuses his attention in one man only; one man that to his opinion stands out from the crowd as he doesn’t belong to any group and somehow manages to awaken his curiosity at a deeper level. The transition is so smooth that the reader barely notices the shift. So much the story absorbs you that you unconsciously urge the narrator to continue follow the old man, without suspecting his true intentions, for which he secretly gave us hidden clues at the beginning of the story “It was well said of a certain German book that “er lasst sich nicht lesen”-it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes -die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And then the essence of all crime is undivulged” (Poe). The not so finished story leaves the reader on his own at ... ... middle of paper ... ...hey were, still they were just the man of the crowd. In a conclusion, the whole story may also be a portrayal of the situation of that time, and the old man may be an individualist who cannot be categorized socially. This may have been a consequence of the overwhelming changes that came with modernity and the dissolution of the traditional networks. While some people found themselves as part of the certain social groups, others were left out completely. People moved from their villages or from city to city for a better life; they no longer were tied to their land. So, they may have found themselves alone in the middle of the crowd away from their families and founded hard to adapt to any specific social group. Work Cited Allan Poe, Edgar. “The man of the Crowd”, 1840. March 10, 2014. http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-man.htm

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