“The Man of the Crowd” is told from the first-person point of view of an unreliable narrator. At the beginning of the story, the narrator reveals that he has recently been in recovery from an unspecified illness—possibly a mental one. This information immediately throws his reliability into question for the reader, suggesting that his perceptions may be distorted by his mysterious condition:
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, where the film from the mental vision departs […] 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. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain.
In this passage, the narrator’s insistence that he is not only fully recovered from his illness but that he is filled with a kind of supernatural mental clarity surpassing the minds of famous philosophers like Leibnitz (a 17th century German philosopher) and Gorgias (an Ancient Greek philosopher) feels overly forceful and confident, immediately raising questions about his reliability. The narrator has an unusually high opinion of himself and his own mental abilities, believing that his powers of observation are so keen that they verge on the psychic.
The narrator gives more insight into his unreliability later in the story:
The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window, prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years.
Here, the narrator’s use of the word “enchained” suggests obsession or compulsion—he is not choosing to observe the people walking by, but rather feels compelled to do so by some force outside his control. He admits that the “wild effects of the light” and speed at which the crowd is moving past him are obscuring his vision, getting in the way of him making accurate and trustworthy observations. Significantly, he also describes his mental state as “peculiar,” suggesting that, on some level, he is aware that his perceptions are being clouded by his mental illness.
The use of an unreliable narrator is particularly significant in a detective story like “The Man of the Crowd.” By using an unreliable narrator, Poe invites the reader to take a more active role than usual, using their own detective skills to look for clues and determine which parts of the narrative should and should not be believed.
