Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The man of the crowd

The man of the crowd

Poe, Edgar Allan

Paperback

Series: Edgar Allan Poe Collection

Classic FictionGeneral FictionHistorical Fiction

ISBN10: 1515251500
ISBN13: 9781515251507
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Jul 27 2015
Pages: 26
Weight: 0.12
Height: 0.06 Width: 5.98 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
The story is introduced with the epigraph Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul - a quote taken from The Characters of Man by Jean de La Bruyère. It translates to This great misfortune, of not being able to be alone. This same quote is used in Poe's earliest tale, Metzengerstein. After an unnamed illness, the unnamed narrator sits in an unnamed coffee shop in London. Fascinated by the crowd outside the window, he considers how isolated people think they are, despite the very denseness of the company around. He takes time to categorize the different types of people he sees. As evening falls, the narrator focuses on a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age, whose face has a peculiar idiosyncrasy, and whose body was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble wearing filthy, ragged clothes of a beautiful texture. The narrator dashes out of the coffee shop to follow the man from afar. The man leads the narrator through bazaars and shops, buying nothing, and into a poorer part of the city, then back into the heart of the mighty London. This chase lasts through the evening and into the next day. Finally, exhausted, the narrator stands in front of the man, who still does not notice him. The narrator concludes the man is the type and genius of deep crime due to his inscrutability and inability to leave the crowds of London.

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