As evening falls, the narrator focuses on "a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age", whose face has a peculiar idiosyncrasy, and whose body "was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble" wearing filthy, ragged clothes of a "beautiful texture".

The man leads the narrator through bazaars and shops, buying nothing, and into a poorer part of the city, then back into "the heart of the mighty London".

The narrator concludes the man is "the type and genius of deep crime" due to his inscrutability and inability to leave the crowds of London.

[6] Poe purposely presents the story as a sort of mystification, inviting readers to surmise the old man's secret themselves.

[7] 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.

[9] 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".

[9] “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.

[11] In agreeing with Benjamin, William Brevda contributes that “Poe splits the human psyche into pursuer and pursued, self and other, ego and id, “detective” and criminal, past and future…” “Poe also echoes Sophocles in his theme of the guilty knowledge that humans run from and simultaneously toward.

[17] At the time of the story's publication, Poe's reputation in the United States was mixed, but his reception among many French modernists, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, was enthusiastic.