We have discussed the relationship between the literary gothic (or "uncanny") and narratives in which the narrator and/or protagonist is clearly suffering from psychological disturbance. Dickinson's poems, Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" and Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" all work quite well as illustrations of this interrelationship. But what about a text such as "The Man of the Crowd," in which neither madness nor gothic/supernatural elements are immediately evident? Can you identify any aspects of this odd story that you would associate with "madness" in some form? If it is difficult to label this text as "gothic," is there anything that might correspond to how Freud defines the "uncanny"? (note: you do not need to answer both of these questions).
""This old man,I said at length "is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd."", This quotation from "The Man of the Crowd" by Poe, is not characteristically Gothic, much like the rest of the story. There is no mention of the supernatural or any unnatural madness. The old man in the story does act strange, however his behavior is that of a troubled addict or an old alcoholic.
ReplyDeleteThe old man stalks around the streets of London looking for the most crowded places. His reasons for doing so could vary from the need for alcohol, to the need to escape the thoughts in his head to simply being lonely.
The man , the one who finds the actions of the older wanderer intriguing, is more questionable in my opinion. Why does he decide to follow the old man around all night long? Why does this man spend so much time analyzing every variety of person he sees? I believe that there is more going on in the head of the young man than in that if the old one wandering about the streets.
In Poe’s text “Man of the Crowd” there are no glaring signs of madness, so the reader must identify the madness through subtle examples. The narrator begins his story by staring at and obsessively categorizing everyone who passes him. This in itself is pretty odd, but could be overlooked if this was the only symptom. The narrator claims “in my then particular mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (1538). This reminds me of how in our other texts, the narrators often will claim clairvoyance or seem to just know things that they would have no way of actually knowing.
ReplyDeleteAs the story goes on, the narrator becomes obsessed with an old unnamed man who passes him on the street. The narrator cannot seem to categorize the old man and decides that his best option is to follow the man for the entire night and into the morning. The fact that that narrator is obsessing over such an insignificant person/idea in his life is alarming. This reminds me of Poe’s other text “The Tell Tale Heart”, and how the narrator in that text obsesses over the eye of an old man that he lives with. The obsession is more violently channeled in “The Tell Tale Heart”, but it is still there in “Man of the Crowd”. Finally, another symptom of madness could be the lack of self-awareness of the narrator in the text. The narrator does not even seem to really grasp how odd he is being, but he does judge the old man for aimlessly walking around London at night, even though he is doing the same thing.
When reading The Man of the Crowd, my immediate first thoughts were not that the narrator was 'mad,' however, simply his obsession with the actions of the man walking the streets of London is a sign of madness. As I was reading, I noticed the adjective 'wild' came up frequently, one time describing the narrator's 'wild amazement' which I associate with the word madness. The narrator also says "For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent..." (1536) and "in my particular mental state..." (1538). These could show that the narrator may have been previously been diagnosed mad and now considered himself improving, but his behaviors in this story say otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI see characteristics of a Gothic story in The Man of the Crowd because it takes place in London. The narrator describes the area as "the most noisome quarter of London, where everything wore the worst impress of the most deplorable crime. By the dim light of an accidental lamp...The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation" (1839-1840). London has a dark atmosphere, similar to what I have previously seen in Gothic stories like Northanger Abbey and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In Poe's work, "The Man of the Crowd", we are not told directly that he is mad, but that does not mean madness does not exist within the text. Similar to "The Tell Tale Heart" in which the man is insistent on his heightened hearing, the man in this work also insists that he has a heightened sense. Multiple times throughout the work he comments on how his sight and analytical abilities of social status are incredibly high and thus allow him to notice more about each individual. For instance, while sitting in the London coffee house he says, "Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interests the innumerable varieties of figures, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance." Especially in the expression "descended to details", one can sense a sort of acknowledgement of his subtle madness. Normally, when one discusses descending into something, they talk about descending into madness because one starts at normalcy and then goes down to madness. But, instead of directly acknowledging and defining his madness, he looks at it as a sort of attention to detail, like others notice certain parts of human nature as well.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, Poe also discretely hints at the man's madness through his conflicted emotions. While he is able to discuss his emotions, he is not necessarily able to confront them, therefore causing him to observe the outside world more than looking inward at himself. While sitting in the cafe, the man notes to himself, "As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness of avarice, of coldness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense, of supreme despair." This overwhelming clash of multiple sets of emotions points to the man's instability as a result of an internal conflict. But, as he states at the beginning and end of the story, "there are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told." And so, I believe that Poe does not directly state the man's insanity because the character's madness is a secret even to himself because he has repressed it so many times, that he is even fooling himself. But, as people looking onto the scene, we are more capable of noting the man's deterioration and descent into madness, or as he calls it, a descent to detail.
The presence of madness is not prominent in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”, however upon a second reading I detected patterns that allude to a metaphor of mental illness and several red flags from the narrator of this text. The character opens the narrative with his internal struggle against repression and regret brought into death. He mentioned that he was recently ill, however he is now “convalescent” and in one of his “moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs”. As we’ve seen in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”, a common trait among the mad is to state outright that they are not only sane, rather they are overly sensitive to new truths and perspectives on the world.
ReplyDeleteWhat was really interesting was the progression of darkness and his obsession and fascination of watching the lives of strangers. The narrator would state every time the night progressed, along with the nightfall came changes in the people around him and within himself. As the story went on, he described his intrigue of the old man in accordance to Freud’s definition of “uncanny”: “As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense, of supreme despair.” This internal conflict is subjective and intense. Such unstable emotions allude to madness, which, in the place of the narrative, ends in an open-ended resolution. The resolution he realizes than man, like secrets “does not permit itself to be read.”
"And as the shades of the second evening come on, grew wearied unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not,...."(1840)It is very apparent that the narrator has a fascination with the exotic and the distant, as he follows this stranger for an entire night and day. No one who isn't mad with an obsession for knowing the man's goals would stalk someone for that long. No normal human contains that type of curiosity. This man is also cloaked and seemingly distant from all of those he walks by. He sticks out but being too hidden within the crowd. Unlike any of the others surrounding him, he stops for no communication to any person nor persons. This right here is very Gothic in the form of an unnatural being. How can someone so old walk for so long without stopping for rest? Then as stated in the quote, there is a hinting towards death. Death is normally viewed as a cloaked creature. Maybe this man is death himself who is just looking for his next victim. That's why when the narrator stops right in front of him the old man doesn't see him because it's not the narrator's time for death. How can the narrator see the old man though if he is death? I would think that this illness that was mentioned in the beginning of the tale, has somehow poisoned the narrators mind. By becoming mad, the narrator seeks death as the only possible escape, that's why he can see the old man.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it may not be evident upon a cursory reading, further analysis of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” shows the connection between the literary gothic and “madness,” or psychological disturbance. In the beginning of the text, the narrator says that after recovering from some unspecified illness, he found himself in a happy type of mood in which “the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition.” In making this comment, the narrator is saying he possesses some special ability that normal humans do not have. Later, he further explains this special ability saying, “in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years.” According to him, he can accurately read and understand a person’s identity simply with a passing glance. The narrator of Poe’s, “The Tell Tale Heart” has a similar ability that defines his madness. “The Tell Tale Heart” narrator says, “disease had sharpened my senses.” In both cases, the narrators associate illness (assumedly mental illness) with the acquisition of some special ability, creativity, or access to some higher knowledge or truth. This is an association that is made in texts about madness that extend farther than just Poe’s works.
ReplyDeleteIn “The Man of the Crowd,” his special ability connects with thematic and conceptual aspects of literary gothic narratives. Sitting by the window of a coffee house in London, the narrator observes the many types of people that travel down the street. He uses his special ability to categorize these people as being clerks, gamblers, Jew peddlars, street beggers, invalids, lepers, young girls, immature children, and drunkards. The person he becomes most interested in, though, is an old man who, at the end, he deems to be a serious criminal. One of the major thematic characteristics of the literary gothic is a fascination with similar figures as these, such as criminals, degenerates, strangers, and the primitive. In addition to this similarity, one of the primary functions of the literary gothic is to explore the relationship between the external and internal aspects of an individual, and the narrator uses his special ability to complete this function in “The Tell Tale Heart.” He makes judgments about the internal aspects of the people he observes by briefly looking at their external appearance and behavior.
Poe begins The Man of the Crowd with a quote from Jean de Lat Bruyère, “Ce grand Malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul,” which translates to “The misery of being unable to be alone.” This idea relates to the old man who the narrator follows for the night, although the reader is unaware of this until the end of the story. The quote that we find more relatable to the old man for most of the story is the German quote, “er lasst sich nicht lesen” which translates to, “it does not permit itself to be read.” Throughout the story, the narrator stalks the old man, who seemingly has no aim, and wanders throughout London with no purpose. While the reader is meant to believe that these quotations pertain to the old man, I believe that it is much more likely that they relate to the narrator. In this story, he sits alone in a café for an evening, watching the passerby. He ultimately decides to follow an old man, for the entire night. If I were an old man living in nineteenth century London, and noticed a man following me, I would be uneasy, and perhaps would wander around the city until he stopped. Perhaps it is the narrator who is the man of the crowd – the man who sits alone in a café, the man who wanders around London. Why is he doing this? Does the narrator permit himself to be read? Perhaps the narrator had planned on stalking someone this evening. He even states “Luckily I wore a pair of gum over-shoes and could move around him in perfect silence.” It is also interesting to note that the narrator never gives the reader the full name of the hotel or café. It only appears as D – Hotel and D—Coffee House. This furthers the idea of suspicion of the narrator as he tells the story. If the narrator and the man of the crowd – the man he follows – are the same person, it would be understandable to hide the name of his hotel. If the narrator and the old man are the same person, and there is a crisis of identity occurring here, then it would make sense that the narrator does not understand the old man. The old man represents the narrator’s unconscious – a thing that cannot be understood.
ReplyDeleteAspects of gothic literature appear in this story as the narrator states, “I caught a glimpse either of a diamond, or of a dagger.” While neither of these things are necessarily normal, (why would an old vagabond have a diamond?) the dagger is obviously a worse thing to have seen than a diamond. The fact that the narrator is unsure of what he saw heightens the tension of the story. Another aspect of gothic literature is the setting – the streets of London as a dense fog hangs over the city in the middle of the night.
My first time reading, “The Man of the Crowd” by Poe, I found that I simply skimmed along the surface of the short story. Upon my first read, the short story revealed to me a protagonist whom enjoyed people watching and stereotyping those who walked by. As I began to read further into the text I found it slightly concerning that the narrator became fixated on one single man within the crowd. Fixated is merely a kindhearted way of saying obsessed.
ReplyDeleteIt was not until my second or third read that I began to see parallels to the madness displayed in Poe’s “A Tell-Tale Heart”. This trait of obsession found within the narrator resembled that in the protagonist in Poe’s “A Tell-Tale Heart”. In Poe's short story, "A Tell-Taled Heart", the narrator becomes obsessed with the old man’s eye. Similarly in Poe’s “A Man in the Crowd” the protagonist becomes obsessed with following this man throughout the night and into the early morning. It is one thing to merely “people watch” and observe one’s actions around you, but it is another to follow someone around and intensely observe their every move. That is pure madness. It is this obsession and stalking that leads me to believe that the narrator is suffering from some sort of psychological disturbance.
It is made evident early on in the short story that as readers we are being taken through the narrator’s stream of conscience. The narrator initially seems relatable; he is simply sitting in a coffee shop looking through the window and people watching. People watching and making judgments are in human nature. It is not until he seems to take us further into his thoughts that the madness is revealed.
Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” initially only seems strange and curious due to the fact that a man, who claims that he has just recently reconnected with reality, resolves to follow a “stranger whithersoever he should go” (Poe, 1539) simply because he sticks out from the crowd. This wouldn’t particularly stand out in most stories as many protagonists have a habit of following their inquisitive urges. However, the majority of this story consists of the man following the stranger around London, continuously going in circles in the hopes to find out more about this man, but also unwilling to confront him.
ReplyDeleteThis story raises many questions in the audience, not only of who the stranger is, but why this man is so intent to follow him for nearly a day. Even in the dead of night when there aren’t many people around, no one seems to notice the strange men wandering aimlessly through London. If the audience remembers the background given of the man, he says that “the film from the mental vision [has departed]” (1536). What if the narrator is still engulfed in madness, though? What if this story he has been telling is entirely in his mind? Now it is impossible to know the answers to these questions, due to the limits of the story as well as the unreliable first person narrator. However, these thoughts produce an uncanny feeling in the audience, as defined by Sigmund Freud as “leav[ing] the reader in uncertainty” (Freud, 227). If the man does exist, it still inspires an uncanny feeling in the audience when they wonder what his purpose in London is, if he even has one, or why he only seems to want to trail behind a group of people. The little details in Poe’s story tend to accumulate and inspire curiosity and what Freud would call an uncanny experience through fiction.
There are hints early on that the man sitting in the coffee shop is questionably mad, or at least not one hundred percent with it. Hinting that he had just been released from being sick may mean that he was in some sort of mental hospital. The story takes off as he describes people in the crowd walking by the shop. Each person depicted is judged based off of stereotypes, perhaps ones that were common during that time. At this point nothing is extremely out of the ordinary, yet, it could still seem a little strange.
ReplyDeleteOnce the man in the coffee shop begins following the old man who is described to be some sort of villain, it gets stranger and stranger. For some reason this man is the only person who he couldn’t quite identify. Eventually, we are led to see how the man identifies with the old man and the old man could in fact be the same person as the man following him. Freud would consider this experience “uncanny” because it seems that the man is facing delusions. All day, he follows around a man that might not even be there, for the man could be another part of himself. This surely seems gothic not only because of the ominous setting of dark alleyways in victorian London but because it portrays fear of oneself. inability to identify that the strangest, scariest thing is what lies within us. Perhaps it’s not as blunt as Emily Dickinson’s poem, but it’s got some of the same ideas.
Although madness, the gothic, and the uncanny are not depicted obviously in "The Man of the Crowd," Poe uses his skill as an author to slip these themes into the background of the story, making them almost more unsettling when you finally uncover them. In terms of madness, the narrator never quite openly states that he is mad, but rather alludes to it in puzzling statements such as "I had been ill in health...the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition...I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain." These moments paint a picture of a man who knows he was ill, but doesn't quite have a grasp of reality. The narrator also seems to think that whatever illness he has is the cause of some sort of special powers when it came to categorizing strangers on the street: "it seemed that, in my peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years." It's obvious to most that you can't immediately know everything about a person by just looking at them, but the narrator seems to believe he has the power to do this. Another facet of the narrator's madness comes from his obsession with the strange old man. It is eerily reminiscent of the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart," who was obsessed with his neighbor's eye and ended up killing him because of it.
ReplyDeleteThere are clearly no ghosts or witches in this story, so where is the gothic? I look in the direction of the setting. "The Man of the Crowd" is set in London on a foggy night, which quickly turns into rain. The "dark, stormy night" trope is evident here, and is where I think the gothic plays in.
The uncanny is a little harder to find in this story. I personally find it within the old man himself that the narrator is pursuing. The uncanny is all about the "unhomely": that which is unfamiliar and strange. This old man is definitely unfamiliar and strange - he does not fit into any of the categories that the narrator sorts people into at the beginning of the story, and all of his actions throughout do not match up with what a typical person would do. He weaves back and forth in random directions through crowds; he crosses the street over and over again in a sort of zig zag pattern; he arrives at places only to go back to the one he started at. Everything he does is unfamiliar and abnormal to the narrator, and as we are pulled along with him and his agitated thoughts about how strange this man is, the real gothic and uncanny feelings set in.
what stuck out to me when reading this was the narrators use of the pronouns "I" and "he" and "we" to describe the man he is following. the narrator seamlessly swtiches between talking in the he/i form and the "we" form. it is as if there is no clear divide between this man he is following and himself. as the story reaches its climax we see that there may not not be. if the man was an image put forth by the narrators own psychosis ensnared brain then it would make sense that the man is always one step ahead of the narrator. the narrator is having this fantasy of a man in the crowd that he will follow and see where he is going but to keep this charade up for himself, the man must be ever elusive to capture. similarly if the man was a product of the narrators mind then it would make sense that there wouldnt be a clear separation between the man and the narrator: allowing for the switching between pronouns. the narrator is unaware that the man he is following is simply a product of his own disturbed mind so he can continue to be fooled by this, in a sense, game that he is participating in.
ReplyDeletenot only was he never going to get to the man, he was never supposed to. that wasnt the end goal of the game. chasing the man wasnt a means to an end: it was the end. the narrators disturbed mind has created this game in which the narrator is trapped in and is unaware he is in.
In “The Man of the Crowd,” Poe’s narrator demonstrates an obvious transgression of social propriety. His fixation with watching people, penetrating the mystery of crowds is in complete opposition to socially acceptable behavior, though he does not outwardly express this lack of etiquette. He is highly imaginative, often to a seemingly maniacal extent; he is governed by imagination and emotion, rather than reason--a very gothic theme, to be sure--which prevents him from looking at things through an objective lens. His mental indiscretions, then, veiled by a pretense of perceived superiority, may be considered a product of madness, of a mind unhinged, which renders him unable to abide by social norms.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator’s attempts at a meticulous study of the two crowds, from which he hopes to derive a greater understanding of individuals, are futile; it is absurd that he should try to scrutinize the depths of individuals from mere glimpses among dense multitudes--even more absurd that he initially thinks it is possible. That he is unable to recognize himself--even when he and his double stand face-to-face--suggests the futility and madness of attempting to understand others strictly from the outside if one is unable to identify, let alone understand, oneself; moreover, there is futility and madness in seeking to fully understand anything, especially when there is nothing to understand.
Freud defines the uncanny as “that class of frightening” that is so because it eventually returns to, or reveals what is familiar; it is what “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud 220, 225). The opening (and ending) of “The Man of the Crowd” seems to predict this: the narrator begins his tale by saying that some things, like a “certain German book”, do not permit themselves to be told, and that some mysteries go “undivulged” simply are never revealed (Poe 1535). This is a bit of an odd opening, because even given the rest of the story, nothing seems to particularly stand out as being in the vein of a ‘crime’ story detective fiction, unlike “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which very much deals with a crime. Arguably, the strange opening only emphasises the rest of the story’s uncanniness, which starts, really, with the narrator’s fondness for people-watching. In his contemplation of the “very denseness” of the isolated (and isolating) city and its inhabitants, he occupies the role of the flâneur, who is at once detached from those he observes and ever present (Poe 1536). The flâneur’s ability to assimilate within a crowd – which the narrator, who wishes to escape London’s isolation and be alone, apparently views as a misfortune – while somehow simultaneously being removed from a situation and existing almost a separate being makes him a character that would fit well within Gothic literature.
ReplyDeleteThe old man of the story represents the uncanny. He is the only person the narrator cannot categorise, and has “a countenance which at once arrest[s] and absorb[s] [the narrator’s] whole attention on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression” (Poe 1538). The narrator’s inability to precisely classify the old man reflects the reader’s own uncertainties about him as the Freudian uncanny, yet despite his ‘facelessness,’ he inspires, “confusedly and paradoxically”, “ideas of vast mental power, of caution… of avarice… of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense, of supreme despair” – that is, he elicits feelings familiar, perhaps perturbingly so, to oneself, but all while being a figure that is also just far removed, or at least unknown enough to be frightening (Poe 1539).
That the narrator is the one to follow the old man, as opposed to the other way around (which one might expect), subverts the reader’s expectations, and in doing so, heightens the story’s Gothic and Freudian suspense. At the same time, however, the reader is left to wonder whether the narrator really is following the old man and pursuing him, or whether the old man is consciously leading him on, aware of that he is being followed, as suggested by the fact that he never turns back to look at the narrator, and does not observe him, unlike the narrator, whose only concern seems to be observation (Poe 1539). Additionally, the old man’s ability to weave in and out of the city crowds as he leads the narrator through strange locales (and ultimately back to the city centre), but ostensibly without being noticed by anyone, but while noticing everyone, is like a more active and insidious version of the narrator’s flâneur role.
The end of the story, then, functions as a culmination of the uncanny, and I found it somehow more unsettling and dissatisfying than the other non-endings we have encountered so far. The narrator realises that the old man is a “genius” for refusing to be alone (the very thing the narrator longs for), and realises is useless to follow him, for “[he] shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds” (Poe 1541). If the uncanny is bothersome because it resurfaces one’s latent tendencies that have subsequently been repressed, Freud further argues that eventually, there is a return of the repressed. Given this, the old man may be that which the narrator has restrained within himself come back to haunt him – clearly, this would be unbeknownst to the narrator himself, but if this is the case, then the “worst heart of the world”, the “grosser book” may be the self (Poe 1541).
On the surface, it is easy to miss the signs of madness in “The Man of the Crowd”. The narrator merely seems to be people watching, sees someone with “an expression I’ve [he’s] never seen before”, and follows him to try to understand him (Poe 1538). While following someone is a little strange, that act in itself does not make a person mad. However, the narrator occasionally hints that there is something wrong with himself. At the beginning of the story, he mentions he “had been ill in health” (1536). Whether that was mental or physical is uncertain until he mentions that he has some special ability. In other works, like the “Tell Tale Heart” and “Diary of a Mad Man” this feeling of uniqueness is a sign of the character’s mental illness. The narrator of “Tell Tale Heart” claims to have special hearing ability and the narrator of “Diary of a Mad Man” claims to be the King of Spain. The narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” claims to have a more normal skill, which is why he doesn’t appear mad at first. The narrator claims that “in my [his] then peculiar mental state, I [he] could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (Poe 1538). Everyone has first impressions of people based on their appearance, but this man claimed to know their history with just a glance.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator follows a man who most likely knows he is being followed. Why would this man rush into crowds and panic when he was alone if he didn’t know he was being pursued? Also, why would he stay out for the entire night literally just walking around aimlessly, and never return to the place he lives? During that night the man “crossed and re-crossed the street without apparent aim”, “gasp[ed] as if for breath while he threw himself amid the crowd”, and had “a strong shudder come over his frame” (Poe, 1539, 1540). These actions are hints that he knew he was being followed, and was scared. Ratiocination is a characteristic of madness that is present in other works we read. The narrator of “A Tell Tale Heart” tries to convince us that he is not crazy for killing a man with no motive, and the narrator of “Diary of a Madman” convinces himself that he is the King of Spain while enduring the tortures of his treatment plan. The narrator of this story has convinced himself that the man he is pursuing has not noticed him, despite “following him closely” for an entire day (Poe 1539). By using this ratiocination, the narrator is again showing a sign that he is probably mad.
I feel that “Man of the Crowd” is indeed a story about madness and the “uncanny”. Initially, I did not find the narrator’s initial curiosity strange. I can see anyone observing strangers to stave off boredom. And at first, the narrator’s observations is indeed “abstract and generalizing”. But once he becomes dissatisfied with that approach, he becomes more interested in the more shadier groups and develop more detailed conclusions. For example, with the pickpockets, he notices their certain tone and the “more than ordinary extension of the thumb” that he thinks proves that they are thieves. That kind attention to detail starts to become more individualized as he focuses all his efforts towards this one old man, essentially stalking him. I think the madness that exists in “Man of the Crowd” is one of pure obsession. Rather than normal acts of stimuli, the narrator finds himself fascinated in who these strangers are and simply cannot let go of this fixations even as it becomes creepy and unhealthy.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator’s stalking also delves into uncanny territory. Considering that the man soon “looks
anxiously around him for an instant, and then ran with incredible swiftness”, I believe that he is aware he is being watched. He is running away from the narrator in the hopes to lose him and so he continually ends up in crowded areas. But he feels that in these crowded areas, more eyes are watching him, and so he escapes only to end up in more populated areas. It is also interesting how the narrator calls the old man “a man of the crowd” for his inability to leave crowded areas. Yet I would argue the narrator is the real man of the crowd as he picks up on little details, paying close attention to each one individually before most likely moving onto the next.