“The Man of the Crowd,” written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1840, is a story that awakens the reader's curiosity and implants vivid images of walking with the people next to the bar where the narrator is sitting. The narrator earns our trust from the beginning of the story and naively accompanies us through the streets of London for a whole day, doing something that is considered wrong, haunting an old man, just out of sick curiosity to know his deepest secrets . . He does this after first analyzing the crowd in general and classifying it into different groups, and then gradually focusing his attention on a single man; a man who in his opinion stands out from the crowd because he does not belong to any group and somehow manages to awaken his curiosity on a deeper level. The transition is so smooth that the reader barely notices the change. The story absorbs you to such an extent that you unconsciously push the narrator to continue following the old man, without suspecting his true intentions, of which he has secretly provided us with hidden clues at the beginning of the story "It was said well about a certain German book that " er lastst sich nicht lesen” – it cannot be read. There are some secrets that cannot be told. Men die at night in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking pitifully into their eyes - they die with despair in their hearts and convulsions in their throats, from the horror of the mysteries which do not allow themselves to be revealed. From time to time, alas, the conscience of man takes on itself such a heavy burden of horror that it can only be thrown into the grave. And then the essence of every crime is not disclosed” (Poe). The not-quite-finished story leaves the reader only…middle of the paper…hey, they were, and yet they were just the man of the crowd. In conclusion, the whole story could also be a portrait of the situation of that time, and the old man could be an individualist who cannot be classified socially. This may have been a consequence of the overwhelming changes brought about by modernity and the dissolution of traditional networks. While some people found themselves part of certain social groups, others were completely excluded from them. People moved from their villages or from one city to another for a better life; they were no longer tied to their land. So, they may have found themselves alone in a crowd, far from their families and having difficulty fitting into any specific social group. Work cited Allan Poe, Edgar. “The Man of the Crowd,” 1840. March 10, 2014. http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-man.htm