“The Man of the Crowd”, written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, is a tale that arouses the reader's curiosity and implants images vividly from the people walking along the cafe where the narrator is sitting. The narrator gains our trust from the beginning of the story and naively guides us through the streets of London for an entire day, doing something that is considered wrong, stalking an old man, just out of unhealthy curiosity to know his deepest secrets. deep. . He does this after first analyzing the crowd globally and classifying it into different groups, then he gradually focuses his attention on a single man; a man who, in her opinion, stands out from the crowd because he doesn't belong to any group and somehow manages to spark her curiosity on a deeper level. The transition is so smooth that the reader barely notices the change. The story absorbs you so much that you unconsciously encourage the narrator to continue following the old man, without suspecting his true intentions, for which he secretly gave us hidden clues at the beginning of the story. “It has been said of a certain German book that “er last sich nicht lesen” – it cannot be read. There are secrets that cannot be revealed. Men die at night in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking pitifully into their eyes; they die with despair of heart and convulsions of throat, because of the hideousness of the mysteries which cannot be revealed. From time to time, alas, man's conscience carries a burden so heavy with horror that it can only be cast into the grave. And then the essence of any crime is not disclosed” (Poe). The not-so-finished story leaves the reader to fend for themselves midway through... hey, they were just the man in the crowd. In conclusion, the whole story may also be a representation of the situation of that time, and the old man may be an individualist who cannot be categorized socially. This could be a consequence of the disruptive changes linked to modernity and the dissolution of traditional networks. While some people found themselves in certain social groups, others were completely excluded. People left their villages or from town to town for a better life; they were no longer linked to their land. So, they may have found themselves alone in the crowd, far from their family and had difficulty adapting to a specific social group. Work cited by Allan Poe, Edgar. “The Man of the Crowd,” 1840. March 10, 2014. http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-man.htm