possibly seen under his cloak - whatever crime he has committed condemns him to wander. This lack of disclosure has been compared to similar vague motivations in "The Cask of Amontillado". Poe purposely presents the story as a sort of mystification, inviting readers to surmise the old man's secret themselves. At the beginning of the tale, the narrator surveys and categorizes the people around him in a similar way as Walt Whitman in "Song of Myself". Poe's narrator, however, lacks Whitman's celebratory spirit. While viewing these people, the narrator is able to ascertain a great deal of information about them based on their appearance and by noting small details. For example, he notices that a man's ear sticks out a small amount, indicating he must be a clerk who stores his pen behind his ear. Poe would later incorporate this ability to observe small details in his character C. Auguste Dupin. All of this is a virtuoso performance of the representation of social typicality; it owes something to Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, but there is also something of the moralizing medieval Vice in its parade of degenerates, of depraved women and of social outcasts. In one sense this is a sideshow, a digression from the main line of the narrative, which is concerned with the crowd only as an abstract force; in another, however, it brings to the fore the sense that it is only through these social clichés that the crowd can be made humanly understandable. In describing the man, the narrator “describes a set of contradictory characteristics: ‘there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense – of supreme despair’. The man’s dress, too, is contradictory: his linen is dirty but ‘of beautiful texture’, and through a tear in his cloak the narrator glimpses a diamond and a dagger.” “The Man of the Crowd” stands as a transitional work between the haunting Gothic tales of the late 1830s and the ratiocinative fiction of the early forties, possessing obvious qualities of both. This story is also the beginnings of Poe's detective stories. Walter Benjamin writes that "[The Man of the Crowd] is something like an X-ray of a detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents. Only the