Edgar Allan Poe’s Man of the Crowd is a narrative about mystery, art, and urbanism that is sprinkled with images of doubleness and descent. By questioning the narrator’s power of imagination, the tale replaces the vision of artistic imagination with a more ironic view of society and humanistic interactions. Poe presents insight on urban relationships by highlighting his distaste for isolation and the loss of individuality that city life fosters. By using symbols like the ‘dagger’ and the ‘diamond’, Poe sends the critical message to his readers that human life is infested with poverty and crime on all levels. Along with the narrative tone, he uses internal focalization to develop on the sighting of the ‘man’ as a symbol of interaction and stature …show more content…
in the modern world. Poe offers an interpretation that the narrator’s ‘sighting’ and ‘pursuit’ of the old man through the crowd might only be a metaphorical journey through the narrator’s own mind and that the old man is actually an apparition of the demented narrator. By splitting the human psyche into chaser and chased, Poe explores the themes of conflict, curiosity, and loneliness throughout the tale while simultaneously focusing on the narrator’s internal struggles, as he deals with his own curiosity. The ordinary person, the man in the street, is at heart a criminal. The nameless narrator who has just recovered from an unspecified illness is sitting at the window of the “D-Coffee House” in a London hotel, reading the newspaper and observing “the promiscuous company in the room”.
He describes, in brief, his illness and that he is now “convalescent” and with “returning strength”. Interestingly, Poe chooses to open with the line “Not long ago, about the closing in autumn, I sat at the large bow window…” and introduce the tale and plot from an anecdotal perspective. By cleverly employing foreshadowing, he subtly sets the atmosphere to that of revisiting previous memories. Although he appears to be in a state of eternal bliss, his sadistic feelings are questionable: “Merely to breathe was enjoyment, and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in everything.” Although he feels calm and inquisitive of his surroundings, his mind appears to be fickle and vary between the two …show more content…
states. As the narrator mostly describes the city at night, the reader sees almost nothing of the daylight hours.
The audience is left with a dark and gloomy image of the city. By providing this sole nighttime depiction of the city through the narrator, Poe automatically creates a depressing outlook on city life that permeates through the story and provides the stage for the entire narration. He uses the city of London to create a connection in the reader’s mind between modern cities and the growth of impersonal crime. Poe has the narrator enumerate the features of the "verge of the city" in more detail than any other part of London. He states that this place "[wears] the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime". The poverty and crime reveal that people do not care about each other, in that no one helps the poorest of the poor and the criminals have no regard for their fellow city
dwellers. Poe’s observations of passing crowd are at first “abstract and generalizing”, but he cleverly identifies 5 kinds of passersby and relates them to the various stages in human life - the “satisfied” businessmen, “flashy” junior clerks, “staunch” senior clerks, “dashing” pickpockets, and “swarthy” gamblers. He is interested in the minute details of the innumerable varieties of “figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance”. A contradiction lies here: he points out there are "innumerable varieties", yet he does exactly the opposite by ‘evaluating’ the types of people that he sees and placing each person into a specific category. The narrator treats each person within each of his classifications as the same as the whole: though he calls them "individuals", he immediately places them into a larger group. Poe here is trying to convey to the reader that although people believe themselves to be distinct in the city, they have already lost their individuality by being part of the crowd. The narrator uses the setting of the bustling downtown center to highlight the extent of isolationism and urbanism in the city: “When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering; but redoubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon their lips, the course of the persons impeding them.” He notes that there is nothing distinctive about their “habiliments” of these “men of leisure” (the “noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers”).
Role of the City in Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue and Hoffmann’s Mademoiselle de Scudery
Poe continues to develop his point that no one escapes death through the setting. Not only does he use the exterior and how it was constructed to tell what precautions P...
The writing style of Edgar Allan Poe shows the writer to be of a dark nature. In this story, he focuses on his fascination of being buried alive. He quotes, “To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these [ghastly] extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.” page 58 paragraph 3. The dark nature is reflected in this quote, showing the supernatural side of Poe which is reflected in his writing and is also a characteristic of Romanticism. Poe uses much detail, as shown in this passage, “The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lusterless. There was no warmth. Pulsation had ceased. For three days the body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a stony rigidity.” page 59 paragraph 2. The descriptive nature of this writing paints a vivid picture that intrigues the reader to use their imagination and visualize the scene presented in the text. This use of imagery ties with aspects of Romanticism because of the nature of the descriptions Poe uses. Describing the physical features of one who seems dead is a horrifying perspective as not many people thing about the aspects of death.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” follows the story of a young man who is sadden by the death of a woman named Leonore. As the reader advance through the poem, the main character is getting more and more emotionally unstable. He is clearly suffering from some kind of mental illness most likely depression. The narrator is in first person, we are living the poem through the eyes of the main character. (He compulsorily constructs self-destructive meaning around a raven’s repetition of the word 'Nevermore ', until he finally despairs of being reunited with his beloved Lenore in another world. Just because of the nightmarish effect, the poem cannot be called an elegy.) Poe use vivid details to describe how the narrator is gradually losing his mind.
Image a family. Now imagine the parents divorcing and never see the father again. Then imagine the mother dying and leaving three kids behind. All of which get taken in by someone. The two year old is given to a family, with a loving mother and caring father. Edgar Alan Poe did not have to imagine this, this was his childhood. Poe’s difficult youth was a heavy contributor to his perspective that pain is beautiful. Poe illustrates many things in “The Raven”, one of his most well-known pieces. “The Raven” is about a depressed man who lost his lover Lenore. The speaker states “’Tis the wind and nothing more!” (Line 36) in his delusional state to help himself cope with his loss. In “The Raven” Poe uses irony and complex diction. This helps Poe create his theme of the human tendency to lie to one self to feel better.
Some of his writings were much more personal for Poe such as “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Even through both poems, reflect his personal life in some way “The Raven” portrays his own personal experiences. The death of his wife was one of the most influential deaths he had to deal with. Her death led to a period of hard drinking and staying up all hours to watch over her grave, sometimes even sleeping on her grave to be closer to her. During this period of hopelessness led to the writing of “The Raven.” The poem “The Raven” is about a man and his sorrow over the death of Lenore. The raven, which may symbolize the devil, forever hunting him and a living reminder of the death of his wife. In the poem, he shows the world of his pain of having his wife taken away from him and compares death to the raven. This shows us how the raven reminds him of what he suffered after the death of his wife. The Raven” gives us an idea of what Poe was dealing with during this time of depression. Poe knew this direct and individual experience well, unlike his other works. “The Raven” was a more personal experience to Poe because it talked about something that touched him deeply and affected his. “The Raven” was a poem about his own actual life. In this way “The Raven” is a prime example of the true Poe and how his life affected his
In the short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe, diction is extensively used to create an air of suspense. Poe’s use of diction along with symbolism contributes to establishing a mood of despair. By using symbolic comparison between the Ushers and their house, the story’s suspense builds and the characteristics of the Ushers are portrayed. Poe’s cunning tactics are evident in the way he achieves a story of both suspense and horror.
The short story is generally a study in human terror. Furthermore, the author explains Poe use of a particular style and technique, to not only create the mood of mystery, but to cause the reader to feel sympathy for the narrator. Poe makes a connection between the storyteller and reader with knowledge and literary craftsmanship.
The story opens with the narrator explaining his sanity after murdering his companion. By immediately presenting the reader with the textbook definition of an unreliable narrator, Poe attempts to distort his audience’s perceptions from the beginning. This point is further emphasized by his focus on the perceived nexus of madness; the eye. Poe, through the narrator, compares the old man’s eye to the eye of a vulture. Because vultures are birds that prey on the weak and depend on their eyesight to hunt, it is easy to deduct that Poe’s intention is to connect the narrator’s guilt and his interpretation of events in his life. By equating the eye to the old man’s ability to see more than what others see, Poe allows the narrator to explore the idea that this eye can see his weakness; the evil that lies in the narrator’s heart and that which makes him unacceptable. Knowing that he is damaged makes the narrato...
One major way that Poe gets the theme across is by using substantial amounts of symbolism all throughout the story. Poe lets the narrator reveal his unexplainable fixation over his neighbor’s eye by admitting, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. . . . I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, a...
The story is told through the subjective viewpoint of the narrator who begins by telling the reader he is writing this narrative to unburden his soul because he will die tomorrow. The events that brought him to this place in time have “…terrified, tortured and destroyed him” (Poe). This sets a suspenseful tone for the story. He blames the Fiend Intemperance for the alteration of his personality. He went from a very docile, tenderhearted man who loved his pets and wife to a violent man who inflicted this ill temperament on the very things he loves. The final break from the man that he once was, is the “…spirit of PERVERSENESS” (Poe 514). He describes this as doing something wrong because you know it is wrong. Evil consumes his every thought and he soon develops a hatred for everything. “Speaking through his narrators," Poe illustrates perversit...
In Poe’s own life no durg could ever fully numb him to the pain of all his loses. His only true solace from his despair was in literature and his writings. Poe believed that visual art allowed the spirit to transcend the plane of reality to which it was stuck. In the Raven the narrator closely resembles Poe in this aspect. The narrator spends many a night reading long forgotten literature in an attempt to forget his own troubles after his loss. This is explained beautifully by Poe with the line “Eagerly I wished the morrow;- vainly I had tried to borrow, / From my books surcease of sorrow- sorrow for the lost Lenore.” (Poe 9-10) No matter how hard he tries; however he can shake the crushing despair that has a firm grip on his emotions. One dreary night the narrator gained an unsuspecting visitor. This visitor came in the form of a raven that flew into his window. The raven torments the man reminding him of his insecurities, his flaws, and his loss. The raven accomplishes all these things by rhythmically answering his pleas with but one word, to quote the raven “nevermore.” Just like the narrator will nevermore see the face of his dead love, he too will never be free from his despair. For as long as the man lives much like Poe he
For poets, it is essential that they write about what they know and what they feel, as the substance of what they are revealing will enhance their work and ultimately attract audiences. Edgar Allan Poe is one poet whose personal endeavours can be extracted from his poems. His works such as The Raven, Annabel-Lee and Ulalume are just a few of his most celebrated poems that reflect diverse aspects of Poe’s own life. Poe’s reoccurring themes of death in conjunction with love, the subconsciousness of self and ambiguity attracted audiences to become entranced in his work (Spark Notes, 2014). Adjacent to these intriguing themes is how Poe’s personal life was inexplicitly perceived in his poems, in particular The Raven.
In the beginning of the story, with an extensive and vivid description of the house and its vicinity, Poe prepares the scene for a dreadful, bleak, and distempered tale. The setting not only affects Poe’s narration of the story but influences the characters and their actions as well. Both the narrator and his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, question w...
Throughout Edgar Allan Poe’s life, death was a frequent visitor to those he loved around him. When Poe was only 3 years old, his loving mother died of Tuberculosis. Because Poe’s father left when he was an infant, he was now an orphan and went to live with the Allan’s. His stepmother was very affectionate towards Edgar and was a very prominent figure in his life. However, years later she also died from Tuberculosis, leaving Poe lonely and forlorn. Also, later on, when Poe was 26, he married his cousin 13-year-old Virginia, whom he adored. But, his happiness did not last long, and Virginia also died of Tuberculosis, otherwise known as the Red Death, a few years later. After Virginia’s death, Poe turned to alcohol and became isolated and reckless. Due to Edgar Allan Poe’s loss of those he cared for throughout his life, Poe’s obsession with death is evident in his works of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, in which in all three death is used to produce guilt.