It Takes One to Know One, Essay Example

Edgar Allen Poe’s The Man of the Crowd describes in great detail crowds of people in London observed by a narrator, who primarily uses physical terms to categorize individuals that are passing by. The Jewish merchants are identified by their “hawk eyes”, alcoholics by their “lack-luster eyes”; the narrator believes that he can know the soul of people by simply glancing at their faces as they pass by. His main focus, the Man of the Crowd, is a person who exhibits the “type of genius of deep crime”, a conclusion he draws after stalking him for hours. In fact, although the reader is encouraged to trust the narrator’s account of following the man, one is left with the conclusion that rather than the man of the crowd being a criminal, the narrator has projected his own evil impulses onto that man. This paper will present the thesis that the narrator is, in fact, himself the person in the story who is capable of engaging in evil or criminal acts, rather than the old man who he stalks throughout the tale.

The Man of the Crowd opens by describing the dark heart of man, a description which foreshadows the evil that is surely going to present itself in the story; the real question, however, is where that evil will come from: “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 thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.” During his obsessive and lengthy pursuit of the old man with the “daggers” hidden beneath his coat, the reader initially trusts the narrator, following him into the crowd and along the foggy, misty London night into daybreak. Ultimately, the reader must face the realization that he or she has been taken in by someone who appeared trustworthy but may in fact be hiding a much darker nature than that of the man of the crowd.

The character of the narrator becomes fearsome, as one is left wondering whether he might be projecting his own horrible impulses onto the old man. The evidence for this is the ease with which he is able to empathize with the old man, who he claims is a criminal. Both of them are men of the crowd, and it appears that the narrator identifies with the old man very easily, as if there is a certain darkness in his own heart. While the old man is following the crowd, the narrator is pursuing the old man in much the same way that gives the impression that he is a stalker–criminal behavior to be sure. At the same time, he succeeds in engaging the reader into trusting him by providing painstaking detail regarding all of the Londoners and in particular, this old man. His technique succeeds, as he provides information about the last several months of his life and his illness, and this provides a reasonable explanation for the extreme curiosity that he plays out towards the old man: because this is one of his first excursions out of the house, feeling healthy, this being one of his first ventures outside, he feels as though he is in a mood when “the film from the mental vision departs, and intellect surpasses its everyday condition.”

Edgar Allen Poe, in his stories and poetry, demonstrated a preoccupation with danger, horror, and evil, and in his short story The Man of the Crowd, he masterfully seduces the reader into having complete confidence in the narrator initially, and in viewing the old man as malevolent. Only gradually does the knowledge creep up on the reader that in fact, it is the narrator who has been deceptive and who has a sinister heart that is more likely to be a threat than the old man who is simply odd but innocuous. The reader has been deceived by the narrator, but this only becomes apparent at the very end of the story, and can easily be overlooked because of the masterful tactics employed by the narrator. He has been warning the reader about the evil that comes in the person of the old man, when all along it is the evil that is unseen but presents itself in the form of the seemingly observant, curious man who has helped the reader navigate through a crowd that he has labeled “tumultuous” as well as “promiscuous.” The supposedly unspeakable evil that he has attributed to the old man is actually the person who has accompanied the reader all along.