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The Man of the Crowd
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Man of the Crowd, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Dark Secrets
The narrator spends hours people-watching from the window of a London coffee-house, entertaining himself by categorizing passersby according to their class, occupation, and other readily observable traits. But the story takes a darker turn when the narrator begins to follow a strange old man through the streets, imagining that the inscrutable man must have a remarkable history and maybe even a sinister goal in mind. With his bizarre facial expressions and unusual behavior in the…
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Curiosity, Obsession, and the Unknown
From the very beginning, the narrator is a curious and nosy character, obsessing over the personal details he perceives in the people in the street outside the coffee-house. Almost every event in the story is dominated by this curiosity, especially as one particular old man’s strange behavior piques his interest. But even before this uncategorizable figure enters the story, the narrator is determined to fill in all of the blanks about each and every stranger…
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London, Crowds, and Urban Alienation
Despite the hundreds—maybe thousands—of people appearing in it, “The Man of the Crowd” is a story full of loneliness and isolation. The city of London is practically the only feature of the story that has a name; the narrator, the old man, and the countless people of the crowds are never named or given any real identity beyond their outward, everyday appearance. No lines of dialogue are shared between characters, and the two…
read analysis of London, Crowds, and Urban Alienation
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