The Man of the Crowd

The old man is the story’s antagonist. His is an enigmatic figure who roams London’s streets, always attempting to remain anonymous and unobserved. He stands apart from the crowd enough that the narrator can follow him, but never seems to garner any special notice from the other London citizens. His defining features are his ambiguity and unknowability: he eludes classification and understanding.

The narrator describes several ways in which the old man’s appearance contradicts itself, making his social status and occupation ambiguous. His expression, for example, is described as containing both “merriment” and “supreme despair” (Paragraph 13). He is wearing “filthy and ragged” clothes that are nonetheless “beautiful in texture” (Paragraph 14). Even in this initial description, the narrator highlights the old man's contradictory attributes. His face shows seemingly incompatible emotions, and his fancy yet shabby style of dress suggests that he could be wealthy, poor, or somewhere in between. In this way, he is impossible to classify: He is neither rich nor poor, neither happy nor sad. He exists somewhere on the margins of society, and there is no easy way to determine where he belongs.

Regardless of his social status, the old man seems fully at home in the bustling environment of London. He moves easily through different environments—from commercial streets lined with shops to the more impoverished and run-down areas of the city—as long as there are large groups of people around. Whenever the crowds dissipate or the old man turns into a less populated area of the city, he becomes agitated and seems eager to rejoin a crowd. The diction the narrator uses to describe the man in these moments is intense: the man “gasp[s] as if for breath” and wears an expression of “intense agony” (Paragraph 18), making it seem as though being apart from the crowd causes him great pain. His desperation to never be alone suggests that he is most comfortable when he can anonymously blend in with others, making him well suited for the city environment and, potentially, for the vice and crime the narrator seems to associate with urban living.

The old man’s age, combined with his unceasing movement throughout the city, is another contradictory aspect of his character. The narrator describes the old man as “very thin, and apparently very feeble” (Paragraph 14), yet the old man roams the city without stopping for days at a time. One way to interpret the man’s feebleness is that he is symbolic of death and mortality. This interpretation could correlate with the narrator’s illness—perhaps the narrator is so obsessed with the old man because, having just been sick for a long period of time, he is now contemplating the idea of his own mortality.

Whether the old man symbolizes death or crime, the ambiguity surrounding his personality and his meaning reinforces the story’s theme of Unknowable Secrets. The mystery of the old man heightens the story’s feeling of suspense and intrigue; it is central to its use of Gothic conventions and contributes to Poe’s depiction of the city as an eerie and unnerving place. The fact that the old man fails to notice or ignores the protagonist as he continues on his way also raises the question of whether he is human at all, or possibly part of the protagonist's mind, contributing to the man’s unsettling nature.