The Man of the Crowd

“There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them piteously in the eyes—die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.”

These lines set the stage for the story’s exploration of Unknowable Secrets and The Complexity of the Human Mind. By stating that “some secrets do not permit themselves to be told,” the narrator suggests that there are things so horrific that they must remain secret and unspoken. These secrets haunt those who keep them, causing great “despair,” “horror,” and guilt. This discussion of horrific secrets gives the beginning of the story an ominous tone and foreshadows the narrator’s journey through the more treacherous areas of the city.

“For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs—the αχλυξ η πριυ επῆευ—and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias.”

In these lines, the narrator describes his state of mind as he begins to observe the crowd outside the coffee house. His recovery from extreme illness has heightened his senses, and he imagines that his “intellect” is greater than it would normally be. The complex, flowing syntax of this sentence gives the narrator’s thoughts a poetic quality, reflecting his intelligence and his absorption in his own thoughts. The narrator’s decision to include Greek as well as references to the work of a writer and a philosopher (George Combe and Gorgias) highlights the value the narrator places in philosophy and