30 pages • 1 hour read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Man of the Crowd
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1840A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
First-Person Point of View
“The Man of the Crowd” is written from a first-person point of view, giving readers the narrator’s perspective on the events of the story. This type of narration allows readers access to the narrator’s thoughts, giving a sense of the narrator’s psychological depth. Each detail the narrator notices gives insight into his interests and values, but it does not grant access to the interests, values, or thoughts of other characters. In this way, the point of view limits readers’ ability to fully grasp the setting, characters, and events.
The sense of the narrator’s psychological depth is only heightened by the suggestion that his perceptions might be unreliable. It is unclear whether his pursuit of the old man causes the old man distress, because “no moment did he see that I watched him” (Paragraph 17). The narrator may be under the impression that the old man is unaware of his presence, but it is not proof, and it does not account for the old man’s uneasiness. The mysteriousness of the narrator’s psychology further highlights how difficult it is to understand the city and the people who make up the crowd.
Atmosphere
Gothic fiction often takes place in a gloomy, decaying atmosphere that gives a sense of confinement. As he pursues the old man through the darkest recesses of London’s streets, the narrator reflects on the dark and gloomy atmosphere of the city: “It was now fully night-fall, and a thick, humid fog hung over the city, threatening to end in a settled and heavy rain” (Paragraph 15). The narrator’s description not only creates a melancholy image of the weather through the “thick, humid fog” and the threat of “heavy rain,” but also gives the impression that the weather is pressing in on London’s inhabitants, making it difficult to move around and navigate the darkened streets. In addition, the narrator emphasizes the decay he encounters in the outskirts of the city, focusing on the “antique, worm-eaten” buildings and “paving-stones . . . displaced from their beds by rankly-growing grass” (Paragraph 19). Poe toys with Gothic genre expectations by exchanging the traditional claustrophobic and crumbling old mansion for a more public, but still decrepit, space. While the decay of the family structure is commonly seen in Gothic fiction, he expands beyond this exploration to consider similar psychological disfunction on the scale of the urban environment.
Juxtaposition
The juxtaposition of the old man and the narrator invites comparison between the two characters. Both mysterious figures are very adept at remaining undetected: the old man always seems able to hide himself in a crowd of people, though not from the narrator, and the narrator avoids being caught by the old man, despite following him closely for an entire day and looking him directly in the face. This constant back and forth between the concepts of being seen and hidden increases the tension in the story. The narrator also wears shoes that let him “move about in perfect silence” (Paragraph 17), which stands in contrast to the usual commotion associated with densely populated areas. This juxtaposition of sound in addition to the comparisons made between the two main characters lends itself to the Gothic style and moves the plot forward.
Epigraph
The epigraph “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul” translates to “This great misfortune, of not being able to be alone.” It comes from a collection of essays written by seventeenth-century French author Jean de La Bruyère entitled The Characters of Man. In these essays, the author reflects on various types of people and aspects of life, including women, society, and the court. Much like the narrator from “The Man of the Crowd,” Jean de La Bruyère composed this compilation through personal reflections and observations, and often through a critical or satirical lens. The epigraph foreshadows the narrator’s pursuit of the old man, who seems like he cannot exist comfortably when he is not part of a large crowd. The old man’s relentless search for a crowd to be a part of forces him to keep wandering London’s streets day and night, seemingly without a traditional home. The epigraph suggests that the man’s strange existence might also be a source of misery, adding to the sense of fear the story associates with city life.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
