Narrative Voice in Mary Barton, Bleak House, and "Man of the Crowd"

I am deeply perplexed by Edgar Allen Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” in relation to the texts we have been reading. In particular, I am interested in the ways that Poe’s story speaks to how we read stories such as Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Dickens’ Bleak House, and how to interpret the narrative voice in both of these texts. Both Mary Barton and Bleak House are stories told by more than one narrator; one narrator is third person omniscient while the other is a first person narration. My instinct after having read and discussed Mary Barton was to understand these narrative decisions as a rhetorical way of inviting the reader in, to not merely be a passive viewer or passerby, but to try and understand these characters and their lives so they become more than a faceless mass of people. I felt the same reflex while reading Bleak House. We begin with a third person narration, and then move into Esther’s personal narrative voice in Chapter Three, a voice that she herself admits may not be “clever,” but her humility invites the reader in. She admits that she may not be “quick,” but she “had always rather a noticing way—a silent way of noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to understand it better” (Dickens 28). I immediately thought of the way that Gaskell invites the reader into the city, to understand all the characters and their complexities, and to sympathize, to not only witness the events of the story unfold, but to identify and relate in some way. I felt that Esther was setting me up to read Bleak House in a similar way.

Imagine my confusion after reading Poe’s “Man of the Crowd.” I initially felt that Poe’s story was challenging the notion that an outsider can move in, and understand, and that the city and its dwellers will remain faceless and unknowable-- that this is what the city does to individuals. But, I decided to revisit the story because I was not satisfied with this conclusion. As I re-read the story, I realized that the narrator is not seeking to understand the stranger, and that his declarative sentence in the end, which is obnoxiously delivered out loud, is not a reflection of the stranger, but is instead a reflection of his own need to justify his inability to understand. Based on the narrator’s environment at the beginning of the story, it is obvious that the narrator is somewhat accustomed to leisure, and conveniently has the time to follow this stranger with whom he has become infatuated; the narrative has already established a sense of class hierarchy. He then proceeds to follow this man throughout the city, noting the people he passes and describing them based purely on their outward appearances. At the end of his pursuit, he has come no closer to understanding the stranger and neither has the reader, but instead of interacting with the stranger, the narrator surrenders and decides that the stranger is ultimately a reflection of the unknowable and undecipherable crowd. As a reader, I am less convinced. After having read Mary Barton, and taking into consideration Esther’s understanding of herself as a narrator, I am more apt to believe that the narrator in Poe’s story represents a kind of surface level understanding of texts, of people, that keep observers passive and at a distance, whereas Esther, Mary and John Barton, as well as Frederick Engels, are asking for a deeper more intimate interaction with texts, crowds, and individuals.