Edgar Allan Poe usually writes gothic stories, but “The Man of the Crowd” is a different kind of a story that includes the detective side of the unknown narrator. It is about a man who just recovered after his illness and decides to go to one of the coffee shops in London and while he was reading his paper he started watching random people passing by and stereotyped them based on their appearances. A shift occurred when the narrator encountered an old man whose facial expression and demeanor he could not place.  This severely troubled the narrator. Additional investigation was therefore required to satisfy the narrator’s curiosity. Therefore, in “The Man of the Crowd” Poe brilliantly painted the folly of unstainable stereotyping. This paper will show how Poe gradually built up the character of the narrator, his self-righteous judgments and finally exposed his folly when he could not label the old man.
Instead of arguing “for” or “against” the narrator's actions, one should much rather be aware of how Poe used the narrator to bring across universal themes. That is why the sentiment of “Don’t judge a book by its cover” may seem critical, but it is only of the narrator, and not of Poe’s writing. So, when he describes the people it gives the sense of the society itself. Since every country or city has their own culture and traditions whether it is the way they dress or how they act and talk.
Moreover, the narrator’s way to unveil what is hidden is to analyze through their appearances like “alternately reading a newspaper and observing the surroundings both within and without” (“Visual Culture”). So, the narrator is not merely guilty of general stereotyping but even does so offensively.  However, Poe does not claim that the narrator is moral. He honestly states that his “more than a- glance upon each visage in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, 'even in that brief interval of a gla...