--Like the other city writings we have looked at so far, Poe's story is about individuality and the crowd. How does his story imagine the relationship of the individual to the crowd? How is it similar to or different from the vision of Hawthorne, Child or Fuller?
--The narrator imagines the man of the crowd as a 'genius of crime,' yet he is not actually seen committing any criminal acts. What, in the end, do you see as the 'man's' crime?
--In "Wakefield," the narrative is framed, leading us to understand the story as about the author/narrator and his own vision of the personality of Wakefield and meaning of the episode he recounts/creates. How does Poe's story lead us to consider or question the narrator and the validity of his narration of this story?
This may be a bit of a stretch, but I will try to explain it.
ReplyDeletePoe sees the man’s crime as being a flat character, as having no real personality that can be developed. The man wanders through the crowds, reaches an endpoint, backtracks through the city, and presumably restarts the entire process. Poe calls the man, “the man of the crowd,” when in reality he has become the crowd himself. The crowd does not judge, does not see like an individual sees, or contemplates like an individual does. “He refuses to be alone,” Poe continues, as, “It will be in vain to follow” because the man does not permit himself to be read or understood (es lasst sich nicht lessen).
The man’s life does not permit itself to be read because it does not have a conclusion. It is continuous and mechanical; he represents an everyman in the crowd. The crowd is lonely, the crowd does not notice others in the crowd, as Poe says as he stops following the man, “I grew wearied unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in contemplation.” Poe finds it fruitless to follow the man as his initial reaction of the man as unusual and different fades away.
I am not sure if Poe also makes an argument against routine and for variety in life, but the old man’s robotic travel through the city appears to be what Poe considers his crime. The man does nothing to change, nothing to be his own man. This fits with Poe’s early description of the two types of clerks he saw on the street: “The tribe of clerks was an obvious one; and here I discerned two remarkable divisions...the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before.” These men are unchanging and interchangeable. They fall into the mold of society, or of life.
So, “he refuses to be alone,” might mean the old man refuses to become his own man, and follows the current trends (or, in the literal sense, ‘the crowd’). The secret of this man does not permit itself to be told, perhaps, because there is no secret. Poe ends his travels with the man because he sees no point in following anymore, and that is the old man’s crime. He could have learned just as much about the man in a similar way that Childs did with the paperboy, possibly creating a better destination for the old man.
--Just to provide a modern example (kind of), I saw the man as similar to pre-programmed crowd members that appear in video games (GTA, Assassins Creed, etc.). If you actually follow the computer-generated people around, they do not actually do anything. They just walk, maybe enter buildings at random (like the old man, and sometimes they will just disappear. You cannot interact with them (you can run into them, etc.) but their purpose is to be filler (and make the environment resemble a city). Again, kind of a stretch, but their story is not told in the game, but they serve that purpose for a reason.
In many ways, Poe’s “crowd” and Hawthorne’s “crowd” are very different. Although Wakefield does intentionally get lost in the city, like the Man of the Crowd, Wakefield’s decision seems less conscious. Wakefield originally planned for a few days of losing himself, and is, in a way, seduced by the anonymity offered to him by the city. The Man of the Crowd seems to be positively affected by greater numbers of people around him. Thus, the Man of the Crowd makes a conscious choice to try and seek happiness in the crowd, much like the narrator of the story is. Whereas Wakefield is stuck without an identity, other than voyeur of his own life, and lost to the city in that way. The differences between the two characters are best illustrated by the endings of the respective stories. My general reaction to Wakefield at the end of the story is that he is a coward. Though I wasn’t sure if I felt he was a coward because he returned home after so long, or because he had left it in the first place. Perhaps it was his indecisive and reclusive behavior that helped shape my opinion of his character. Nevertheless, I felt Wakefield would have been more honorable if he had not returned to his former life after twenty years of voyeurism. The Man of Crowd, however, is almost a glorious and epic character in comparison to Wakefield. Where Wakefield uses the crowd as a way to hide, the Man of the Crowd immerses himself fully in the sea of people. The narrator at one point even says to himself “how wild a history” in reaction to the Man of the Crowd’s expression. One of the main differences between the Man of the Crowd and Wakefield is that former seems to live life fully, and the latter seems to avoid life if at all possible. The fact that the Man of the Crowd outlasts the narrator’s curiosity of him gives him an even more grandiose character and adds mystique to the entire story. The Man of the Crowd seems superhuman, whereas Wakefield seems socially awkward at best.
ReplyDeleteJust as the essence of all crime is undivulged, (101) „It will be in vain to follow [the man]; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animae, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that es lasst sich nicht lesen.'” (109). While the narrator watches the crowd passing the coffee house and describes them of members of tribes and races (i.e. groups of society) starting from the top of society working his way toward the bottom, the man cannot be categorized because he has countenance of “absolute idiosyncrasy.” This immediately evokes a feeling of the man almost being an incarnation of crime within the narrator. During his pursuit, the narrator realizes a lot of contradictory traits of the old man (e.g. his clothes are ragged and dirty, but he observes a dagger and a diamond under coat.) Eventually it becomes apparent that the man in the crowd, who appears to walk around aimlessly, always follows the crowd and when the people scatter, he hastily walks to another part of the city, where he again finds “a crowd” of people. He seems to need these people just like others need air to breath as he “gasps as if for breath” and then displays relief once he is amid the people again.
ReplyDeleteAs DLamble already said, this seems to be like a mechanical process that starts over every day an cannot be explained and does not lead to any explanations just the German book that cannot be read. The mans crime is stated as refusing to be alone. However, it is through these efforts that the man does stand out of the crowd and the question then is if he succeeds in his efforts. One can only assume that the other people of the crowd at some point will leave the crowd and go home where they do not fulfill their societal roles anymore (such as merchants or pick-pockets) but are alone. The man does not take any of the roles and cannot be categorized, and thus, DLamble’s assumption, the man is the crowd, does not seem to be very far fetched at all. In any way, the man’s crime is not a crime in the legal sense, but rather “Le grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul.”
I'm kind of ticked off, because I wrote out a really long post and then there was some sort of blog error when I tried to post and I lost everything I wrote. Basically, there is a lot of overlap between the way Hawthorne and Poe view the crowds of London. Both authors reduce the crowd to a type of scenery, the are instillations of the city as much as they are people. This is seen in Poe's piece in the way he describes the crowd. He tends to categorize groups of people, not individuals, such as gamblers, clerks, more successful clerks. He also describes the individuals as having flushed faces and feeling alone while surrounded by a crowd. There does not seem to be much humanity in the individuals walking the street. The deliberate vagueness of Poe's tale however, lends itself to many plausible interpretations of what the man's actual crime is. I posted several of them (I'm still pretty angry that my post got lost) but my gut reaction is that the narrator and the man are one in the same. Either the two characters represent a person split in two, the strange man the draws the narrators attention is his persona when walking amongst the crowd and the narrator is the persona removed from the crowd where it possesses more of a individual identity. Thus the only reason the man draws the attention of the narrator is that he is actually seeing himself and doesn't recognize it.
ReplyDeleteThe other theory of the two characters being one in the same derives from the vague illness mentioned at the beginning of the piece. The man may actually be in the throws of mental illness and what we are reading is his delusional account a days activities. The reason the man never does anything is because he is the narrator and the narrator is so busy following himself that he never has time to do anything else. The narrator may be aware that he is following himself at some level, he knows he is a criminal and his genius his that his actions allow him to slip into the crowd so easily.
There is also the possibility that the man is actually a criminal, as his physical description seems in line with the perception of what a criminal looked like at the time. The man wears nice but ragged clothing, he appears destitute and he catches the man's eye because of his strange face. The appearance of his face may be an allusion to the idea that you could identify criminals by their physical appearance. The fact that he never buys anything may be indicative of his poverty, plus there is the fact that he carries a dagger. What makes him a genius of crime is the way his actions allow him to assimilate so easily into the crowd. The message may be that here are many types of people among the faceless crowds of a city like London, and some of them are criminals, we just fail to recognize it. It's also possible that the narrator represents society and that he is following the strange man because he fits the bill of a possible criminal, the narrator is waiting for the man to slip up just as society waits for the poor to do the same. The over all vagueness of the story makes me question whether there is any crime at all, there are so many ways to process this story it's entirely possible for two people to opposing arguments of equal validity. This is another story were nothing really significant happens, it's possible that conflict is what gives a story great meaning. It's also this lack of any major conflict that leads me to believe that the narrator and the man are one in the same. After all, there has to be a reason Poe wrote this story.
In both "Wakefield" and "Man of the Crowd", people are able to disappear into the city without notice fairly easily, while at the same time drawing attention to themselves, if an observer just looks hard enough.
ReplyDeleteIn Wakefield, the titular character is described as having "few characteristics to attract careless observers, yet bearing...the handwriting of no common fate" (925). No one is paying attention to him, but the narrator notices that he is actually acting very strangely. Just one extra glance earned Wakefield the attention to realize who he is, and why he might be acting so strange.
In "Man of the Crowd," the narrator observes several groups of people before becoming entranced with this one man. The narrator had been observing the crowd as a whole, but this man had a few characteristics that caught his attention. No one else in the crowd seemed to notice his odd behavior though. In this story, the person who did the best job of blending in with the crowd is the narrator, if he is indeed a trustworthy narrator. He follows this man for hours, through the entire night without being noticed, something that could never happen anywhere but a city.
In both cases, there is an odd mix of blending in, but still standing out if they are closely enough observed. In both cases, the seemingly odd character was worth noticing. I don't know if the authors are taking advantage of this convenience or if they are trying to say that every individual is worth noticing, even in a big crowd. Maybe if we looked closely enough, every person have a story worth telling.
In “Wakefield,” the narration is hypothetical. The reader knows that the author is making up much of what is being said which allows the reader to question the validity of the speculation. Paradoxically, Poe inserts himself into the narrative which makes his knowledge of the story more experiential. The reader is inclined to take what is being said more seriously because the author seems to have been directly involved.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, Poe’s direct involvement turns the story into a didactic testimonial. For example, by placing himself in the scene, he demonstrates the ease with which one can become enthralled with the “crowd.” Poe initially observes the variety of personalities which the crowd encompasses, but becomes deeply interested in a man that seems to lack a direct attachment any of them. Poe even states: “His clothes, generally, were filthy and ragged; but as he came, now and then, within the strong glare of a lamp, I perceived that his linen, although dirty, was of beautiful texture; and my vision deceived me, or, through a rent in a closely-buttoned and evidently second-handed roquelaure which enveloped him, I caught the glimpse both of diamond and of a dagger.” For Poe, this man transcends the previous groups discussed in the story. The man has no specific claims to any one particular group but rather elements of each. He is ambiguous; possessing characteristics of every social sphere. The man “is” the crowd. He illustrates that no matter what “group” one associates with, the ultimate tie is to the greater crowd. This is also why the man is shown walking throughout every part of the city. From the well lit, upper class regions to the urban and downtrodden. No matter what specific class or demographic one associates themselves with, they are ultimately a part of the greater society.
By inserting himself into the story, Poe shows how easily one can become fixated on such an entity. He even states, “Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view--to know more of him.” Poe finds that the man possesses something that is attractive to him. Consequently he follows him around the whole city. Interestingly, the result is fatigue. Poe is exhausted after traveling the streets in search of this man’s demographic association. He realizes that he is simply, “a man of the crowd.” The man is the personification of society, or at least the society within a city. Fixation on association fatigued Poe. The reader is likely to swallow Poes moral message because he writes as if he has learned the hard way from a specific experience.
This may not end up being a very coherent response, and it isn't necessarily generated by one of the specific prompts, but I think we're allowed to free form if we want (yes?), so I'm just going to lay out my reactions, make sense of them if you can.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I'm not exactly sure what to think of this story. Like we said, "Wakefield" has a distinct frame set off by the narrator through which we can view the story, and this story does too. The frame is the phrase "er lasst sich nicht lesen" which we are told means "does not permit itself to be read."
I almost feel as though this is meant to apply to Poe's story as well... There is so much left unanswered and such a lack of action or climax in the narrative that it almost doesn't permit itself to be read. But with that theme of unknowable-ness established, it becomes okay for the Man of the Crowd to remain utterly mysterious, because the narrator has basically explained to us beforehand that there are some secrets that will never be revealed, and it is vain for us to long for them to be. So what is the point of investing ourselves in a story whose solution we know up front will not be revealed to us? Why follow this guy around for twenty-four hours?
[And, by the way, does anyone else find this absurd? This story is very aware of itself and doesn't attempt to be realistic, so the fact that this slightly unrealistic thing commands the majority of the narrative is acceptable - if uninteresting - BUT it makes me wonder about the character of our narrator if he can afford/is willing to follow a quirky old man around for a solid day. What must be missing in his life? How badly must he be wanting to connect? In this way, our narrator is not unlike the Man of the Crowd, who grows twitchy whenever the masses disperse. They are both apparently uncomfortable alone.]
There is also a bit of contradiction against the frame of the "unknowable" at the beginning of the story. In the first few pages, our narrator gives descriptions of the people who walk by the window of the cafe, formulating his assessments from fleeting glimpses of their outward appearance or carriage. Of all things unknowable, I would think the affections and personality traits of a stranger you see passing for a second before you on the sidewalk would be right up there near the top. How on earth can he possibly assume to know any truths about these people, when he himself admits that he catches only a glimpse of them, and that in bad lighting? Is he that astute an observer of humankind? Or again, does this reveal something searching in his own character, some need to surround himself with variable forms of people and make some connection to them?
I think this may be getting at the question in the third prompt above. I distrust his narrative because I suspect he is denying something in his own self-understanding. How can I trust assessments of character from a man who does not fully acknowledge his own character? He says he has recently been sick... from what? Is this supposed to mean something more than it does on the surface?
Overall, I think the biggest observation I can make about the narrator is that he is not all that different in attitude from the man he dubs the Man of the Crowd - in fact, when the story began and our narrator took his place at the window, I thought the title of the story referred to him. Each of these Men of the Crowd seem to be looking for the same thing, which is some sense of belonging to a whole, or feeling connected to other people.
DLamble, I don't know from your posting name what your name is in real life, but I very much enjoyed your modern example of the crowd characters in video games. It becomes so very poignant when you picture the way that same phenomenon occurs in crowds of real people in cities every day.
The narrator imagines the man of the crowd as a 'genius of crime,' yet he is not actually seen committing any criminal acts. What, in the end, do you see as the 'man's' crime?
ReplyDeleteI am going to have to really agree with Dlamble on this idea of Poe seeing the mans crime as "having no real personality", and simply blending in with the "crowd" or society. To me, I almost get a sense of anger from Poe, whether it be anger that the man was so boring and passive and not actually a dangerous threat or the fact that he was angry that this man was choosing to live his life in the crowd and not choosing to stick out. poe could very well be considering this mans way of life a "crime" and that living your life the same way every day is not the way it should be. The man kept taking the same route and going to the same places and this seemed to really bored Poe and even anger him. I was waiting for the man to actually do something dangerous but he never did, maybe Poe felt the same way when he decided to follow him and he was soon let down by his uneventful adventure.
Poe states that man "refuses to be alone”, the man seems to make an intense effort to blend into the crowd, but could this actually mean something a lot deeper such as the idea that the man refuses to be alone with his thoughts or even his own being. In the mans hiding in the crowd he suggests that he may be hiding from something, maybe himself, maybe criticism from the rest of society...the ones who stand out of the crowd. Poe found a lot of people very interesting to look at but then he chooses a person who obviously had to strike his attention but in the end he sees that that person is simply just another face in the crowd, could this be the underlying message that even if one sticks out of the crowd you somehow still manage to be IN the crowd or a part of the crowd in a sense. I feel that this segment of Poes writing could be interpreted in many different ways and that may be the whole idea of it.
I don't know that Poe was necessarily offering any comment on the stranger's personality or lacking personality, if anything I believe his intent was to suggest that the old man was harboring one of those "secrets which do not permit themselves to be told."
ReplyDeleteI'm even weary of saying that though because the question, what is that secret? is unimportant in this narrative. The narrator spends a large part of this story easily classifying men and women in the crowd and with confidence assigns each of them a neat category, but when it comes to the old man the narrator is at a loss. I think that Poe was getting at the idea that among these easily distinguished groups of gamblers, businessmen, military men, etc, there are still individuals who infiltrate the masses with unidentifiable histories and classifications. They are individuals like the old man who cannot and, as Poe suggests, should not be analyzed because these individuals cannot even stand their own true presence.
The beginning passage about men who "die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed" seems to describe the fate of the old man. His crime is his ability to allude these secrets and mysteries which weigh him down so that his only sense of comfort comes from being lost among the crowd. While this story could hardly be called a thriller or mystery in the traditional way, there is a sense of eeriness throughout. From the narrator's first paragraph the audience knows that men like the old man in the story exist and are buried with their crimes. These crimes are never defined as anything more than an individual's discomfort with being alone.
I think that Poe was commenting less on the old man's personality because despite following him, the narrator remains a speculative observer through the entirety of the story. The audience can never fully give credibility to a narrator that is simply guessing about people passing by from behind a newspaper. Personalities can't be a part of these characters being viewed from a distance. Instead, Poe makes clear that these characters are being placed neatly into the narrator's confident classifications except for this old man. In this way Poe retains his famous eeriness, allowing a stranger who can't stand to be with himself a part of the crowd. A man who may die with crimes and secrets and refuses to be alone may be standing among us, I think was Poe's creepy intent.
The narrator in Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" is definitely an interesting one. In "Wakefield" the narrator lets us know up front that the tale is purely conjecture and coming from the narrator's imagination of the main character, however in Poe's story the narrator is actually there relaying facts. In some ways this makes the narrator of Poe's story more credible (i.e. he has actually seen what is going on) but there are a few things that make us question the narrator himself.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, he is simply sitting in front of a window as day turns to dusk turns to night and watching people go by. Now I don't think people watching is all that weird of a pass-time but this narrator does seem to do it for an especially long time, though to his credit most of this time is spent observing the characteristics of the crowd as a whole rather than any individual. That is, until the strange looking older man shows up. At this point our narrator is so intrigued he actually gets up and begins following the man around. This provides an interesting insight into the mind of the narrator, that he is the type of person who is willing to follow someone who looks interesting around in the first place.
Then there is the sheer length of time the narrator follows the man around. Granted, this man is a particularly interesting character so I can't say I blame him for this, but it does seem a little excessive to spend the entire night following the guy around.
I don't think any of this (or even the illness cited at the beginning) is enough to throw the narrator's sanity into question, but it does raise some interesting questions about his own personality.
I was most intrigued by the narrator's response to finding out the man simply wandered around from crowd to crowd. The narrator was shocked and seemingly appalled by this, and for good reason I think. When walking through a crowd we rarely pay any attention to the other people in the crowd, but somewhere in our mind we acknowledge that all of the other people are going somewhere, they have something to do that has placed them in the same crowd at that moment. To have that assumption shattered by a particular person actually not having any specific aim and simply wandering from crowd to crowd would certainly raise a lot of questions and probably cause one to examine crowds in a totally different way.
I appreciated the comparison of the man our narrator follows to a computer generated character in a game. I think when you consider that comparison this story becomes even stranger and throws the reality of the narrators world into question.
I find the narrator in The Man of the Crowd to be more reliable than the one in Wakefield. The narrator in Wakefield, told us upfront that the extended version of the story was based on his own conjectures. Yes, he offered the straightforward summary at the beginning, but after that, it was al based on his own thoughts. He put a lot more of his own opinions in to the story. The narrator admits to making assumptions and assigning characteristics without any real validity. He even told us how he assumed other people viewed Wakefield, which he really had no way of knowing.
ReplyDeleteHowever, in Poe's The Man of the Crowd, the narrator offers more straightforward descriptions of the people he sees. As he people watches, he describes each different class of person he sees. I guess I found him more reliable because he does not just label them, but offers the reader some objective descriptions of the people to back up what he is saying. Even when describing the man, he offers a more neutral description, allowing the reader to make up his or her own opinion. I feel like the narrator in Wakefield would have made up some elaborate back story. Instead, this narrator describes the man physically. He describes the actions of the man. However, although he may be speculative, he is not judgmental and does not make any unjust assumptions.
-Emily David
I think the narrator refers to the old man he has been following for quite a while as a “genius of crime” because the old man unintentionally fooled the narrator. Throughout this narrative, the narrator is able to categorize masses of people based on their expressions and appearances; he is quite good at it from the way he writes. However when the old man enters, the narrator is immediately struck with curiosity about it, he even says that “Anything even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before” (105). The way the old man carries himself is a mystery to the narrator, he cannot for the life of him categorize this man. Ultimately this curiosity about where the old man belongs leads the narrator to follow him all night and into the next day.
ReplyDeleteEventually, the narrator realizes that the old man does not belong to a specific category and I think this upsets the narrator a bit because for one, the time he wasted on following this man and never discovering more about him, and two, it troubles him because he does not understand how the old man cannot be separated from crowds. The “crime” that man commits in this story, I think, is one of not being able to be alone. But like others have posted I can see the narrator as being similar to the man of the crowd because he has been following him this whole time. The narrator concludes the old man can never be comfortable being by himself, yet it is the narrator who voluntarily gets up from one crowd and follows this man through varies crowds, he is never alone either. I think there might be another moral to the story that has to deal with categorizing or stereotypes, that being, be careful of whom you categorize into groups because you might be oblivious to that fact that others can put you in the same group as well.
The narrator imagines this mysterious man in the crowd as a ‘genius of crime’ when he isn’t actually committing a crime. In class we discussed the different levels of privacy within the city. On one side, you could be a public versus private person, which leads to the other side of being an anonymous versus being an individual. In The Man of the Crowd, our narrator underlines the actual ‘man in the crowd’ as a public individual, and I think at this time he could be considered as committing the ‘perfect crime’. Our man in the crowd is being in the public, but also showing his individuality.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator spends an entire day following around this man; he intrigues him. The man looks worn from afar, but the narrator wants to know the wild history that is written in his bosom (105). The man’s clothes are “filthy and ragged” and he also notices that the texture of his clothing was beautiful, which implies that either he is wearing second hand accessories (as our narrator implies), or he was once a well-to-do gentleman of the city. As the narrator follows the man, he makes no mistake to hide himself. I think the narrator is also being a ‘genius of crime’ because he is taking a new role in the city as being public and anonymous, making it a very interesting and tricky situation for him to be in considering he followed the old man for a long while and did not get caught. He has the art of anonymity mastered.
As the narrator follows the man, he watches him hustle and bustle throughout the city. He intently looks at objects in the bazaar and obviously knows his way through the good and the bad parts of London. Throughout the narrator’s adventure, I began to think that the ‘man in the crowd’ is a true ‘genius of crime’ because he knows the city, he knows what his next move is going to be, and he is constantly going. The man in the crowd shows his individuality by not meshing in with the norm of gentlemen in the streets. The other men the narrator mentions are of distinct categories made by the narrator. He categorizes them by profession, which at this time could also be class (however, I do not know what stature gamblers had). He says so himself that he is filled with “a novelty of emotion”, and I assume that once he saw the old man in the crowd, he went after him because he stood out among the attorneys, gamblers, clerks, etc., and got excited. The old man has traits of “of a diamond and of a dagger” unlike the other men in the streets (105).
The old man standing out seems obsolete in this tale because by his clothes and age the narrator and myself can speculate that this is not his first go-around. The old man has roamed these streets before, and obviously has a routine of doing it, which makes him an individual. I think that is what classifies him as a ‘genius of crime’ because he has polished his life in the city, thus knowing how he wants to live and can live in that way. He goes about his life within a sea of younger men who all have oiled hair and tight coats. This man is a seasoned public individual from the streets and his experiences.
2. When I first read “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the Hortulus Animae, and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that es lasst sich nicht lesen.”
ReplyDeleteI wasn’t too sure what to make of the words ‘the genius of deep crime’. To try to understand Poe’s interesting choice of words I looked back to why he was following this man in the first place.
Looking out into the crowd he notices the old man within the mod Poe says “a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.” Poe goes on to mention he wanted to keep the man in view and know more about him, was this all because the man had a peculiar expression on his face? The reason for following the man and wanting to know more, I still don’t quite understand, but never the less Poe follows the old man and makes observations about him regarding his clothes. The old man’s clothes were filthy, but of nice linen Poe observes and I think this strikes him as interesting and wanting to know more about the man and maybe how he obtained these nice linens that were not taken care of. Poe also views a diamond and a dagger and states his curiosity rose when seeing these items. With stereotypes maybe Poe was expecting this guy to be a criminal, since he seemed poor by his dirty clothes, but carried a diamond and a dagger with him.
Poe continues to follow the man in the pouring rain, and notices the old man walks a routine and does nothing. I think Poe was disappointed the man was ordinary, and knew he would learn nothing more by following him. Maybe the ‘genius’ of the crime, is fooling Poe into following him, and appearing like he may be up to risky behavior, when in reality he is an ordinary man. The ‘deep crime’ Poe says, could be the stereotyping of people, and Poe stereotyped this man as someone who could be a criminal based on his clothing and what he was carrying. But in reality the old man “refuses to be alone”, he is constantly with people, and is the everyday man in the crowd Poe realizes.
-Jatelle
The story „Man in the Crowd“ by Edgar Alan Poe is much more concorned with ideas of solitude within the crowded city than Wakefield. In Wakefield, the narrator describes how the main character wants to find out how the life of his family continues if he would disappear and thus, he wants to find out his influence on (parts of) society as an individual. In Poe’s story, the narrator observes the people in the city and comes to the conclusion that refusing to be alone is “the genius of deep crime”.
ReplyDeleteThe story begins when the narrator observes the street from a coffeehouse after having been ill and thus withdrawn from society. In his “inquisitive interest in everything” he at first sees the “tumultuous sea of human heads”, but after a while he starts to pay attention to details. He categorizes the people he sees according to class and profession, but none of them captures his gaze particularly. Contrarily to the old man, however, who seeks the company of the crowd and feels uneasy whenever he is alone, the narrator notices that some people in the crowd ”feel solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around”.
This denseness later allows the narrator to follow the old man very closely. In Wakefield the protagonist fears being followed and interprets every noise as somebody following him. Therefore, the old man seems to understand himself as part of the crowd and he cannot exist without blending into it whereas Wakefield feels as if all the attention is centered on him.
However, it is these qualities that make the old man noteworthy to the narrator who is unable to put him into one of the categories.
Given the final paragraph, the crime of the man of the crowd seems to be that he cannot function without his crowd. The narrator deems him as such because he is so homogenized with the crowd, yet he still has his own personal idiosyncrasies, which I believe, the narrator perceives as some kind of deception. It seems as if he finds it wrong that a person can still spend all his time within a mass amount of people, yet still maintain an individuality that cannot be grouped into a larger classification.
ReplyDeleteThe man of the crowd is a paradox that frustrates the narrator—he's a master at pigeonholing people, and has gotten so accustomed to doing so that when he stumbles across someone he can't so easily stereotype, it turns his world upside down, and instead of actually accepting that fact, he gives up following the man in frustration, because there's no kind of satisfaction he can from a person he can't marginalize—the man of the crowd is too complex for his simple mind.
The answer to the second prompt in this blog is an ambiguous one, as I can see many different answers being derived from it (and have by reading previous comments). My view of man's crime is missed opportunity.
ReplyDeleteIn between speaking of the people traveling through the city, Poe slips in a few quips about the city itself. For the most part, he seems to be praising it. An example would be when he is tracking a man on page 108 and says he was going "to the heart of the mighty London." Poe also describes the differences of people throughout the account, showing the diversity. Multiple times he highlights the possibilities of the city. By the end, I feel like Poe is let down by the people of the city. They have blinders on and refuse to look outside of their own boxed life. Poe actually steps in front of the man at the end and the man continues to walk on. Poe sees all the opportunities for culture and knowledge that the city provides and the story has a frustrated tone because he sees no one taking advantage of these opportunities.
--Heather Hobbs
It seemed like in Wakefield, the narrator played both the role o the story teller and the role of the viewer. He creates the scene from the initial anecdote, but when following Wakefield, he doesn’t write as if he knows what’s going to happen next. So the story is just as much for him as it is from him. The narrator in the Man of the Crowd is a bit different. While he’s recounting the story, the reader is always sure that he knows where the story is headed. Interestingly, there is an unbelieveability to both narrators. In Wakefield, there is a conflict between it seeming like we’re literally following Wakefield, so that time and place are relevant, and following him for 20 years—an impossibility. In Man of the Crowd, there is also a conflict between what seems to be real and what clearly cannot be. I’m skeptical that even in the opening paragraphs, the narrator is able to see such a variety of people from his pub window. Where, in any city, can you see the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor and everything in between, from one vantage point? Then, without rest or sustenance, the narrator follows the old man for over a day. At one point, it seems like he wants to reassure the reader of the veracity of the story, so he lets us know that his shoes make no noise (107) and that, at the end of this journey, he was “wearied unto death.” Despite these attempts, it still seems as if the narrator is following a symbol—man in the city, not an individual in the city. This fits perfectly with the motif of the faceless crowds and the theme of losing identity in the city literature we’ve read thus far.
ReplyDeletePoe’s narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” cannot be easily categorized, much like the subject of his own observations. He informs his audience at the very onset of his story that he had been ill in health for months. Yet the moment he begins to recover, the narrator decides to pass his time people watching from a coffee shop in the middle of London? Maybe I’m reading too much into this simply because of Poe’s reputation as a writer, but I think his propensity to write stories of a Gothic genre, stories that explore the dark sides of human nature, is something to consider.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the narrator of “Wakefield” admits that his story will be an elaboration of another story he has read about the oddities of a certain character. Readers are fully aware that the story is based on the conjectures of the musings of Hawthorne’s narrator, and the opinions/assumptions he provides are more than obvious to spot. Personally, I feel more inclined to trust the narration of Hawthorne’s narrator rather than Poe’s. Hawthorne’s narrator explains that he is attempting to construct his own outline of another character in order to uncover the truth about the spirit of Wakefield, and he tries to include the audience whenever he can: “Let us imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife.” Readers fully understand the intent of Hawthorne’s narrator; there is no veil, no hidden agenda.
On the other hand, Poe’s narrator, while inclined to collect and present detailed observations of the city-goers of London, provides a rather hazy outline of himself. Hawthorne’s narrator can get away with this, because his role is purely that of the story teller – he is not a character in his own story, unlike Poe’s narrator. Of Poe’s narrator, readers can gather that he was ill for a long period of time, doesn’t mind people watching for extended-periods of time, and is okay with stalking a complete stranger – justifiable only by the idea that he is playing “detective.” He doesn’t only follow him around for a few hours, but rather the whole night. Personally, I find his fixation on this unknown character a little disconcerting; it seems to become an obsession. For these reasons, I think Poe intended to have his readers question the validity of his narrator.
It's obvious that everyone has a different idea of what exactly the crime is of the man in the crowd. In my opinion, it would be the man's inability to leave the mass, which is somewhat stated in the last paragraph, "He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd" (Poe 109). The man is always apart of the crowd, ceasing to be alone. The diversity of the crowd is portrayed through this man. He appears to be a representation of all social classes. "He was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble. His clothes, generally, were filthy and ragged; but as he came, now and then, within the strong glare of a lamp, I perceived that his linen, although dirty, was of beautiful texture; and my vision deceived me, or, through a rent in a closely-buttoned and evidently second-handed roquelaure which enveloped him, I caught a glimpse both of a diamond and of a dagger" (Poe 105).
ReplyDeleteThe crime of the man in the crowd is his conformity. His lack of individualism and his adaptation to the things that surround him give him the ability to not be seen or judged using social stereotypes.