To read "The Man of the Crowd" in conjunction with "The Tell-Tale Heart" is to become aware immediately of a number of resemblances between them. In the latter story, too, there is an old man; only this time it is not he who is "The type and the genius of deep crime," but rather the narrator himself. The narrator is the criminal; the story is an account of his crime and its discovery. If the pursuer of the man of the crowd had grasped the significance of what he had witnessed, and, in the insane hope of circumventing his destiny, had killed the man he was following, then all the essentials of "The Tell-Tale Heart" would be present. For this story is one more exploration of the psychology of the bipartite soul.

Living alone with an old man, the criminal-hero develops a profound hatred for him. This hatred he cannot explain, but it seems to him that the eye of the old man is somehow the cause of it. He resolves to murder him, and for a week he goes to the door of his room every night at midnight. At last the victim is awakened by a chance noise made by the madman, who then opens the shutter of his lantern so that a beam of light falls on the hateful eye. Believing he hears the sound of his victim's heart, and alarmed lest this become so loud as to rouse a neighbor, he enters the room and kills his enemy. After making sure that the heart has stopped, he hides the corpse under the boards of the floor. Soon after, the police arrive, and in the conviction that his deed cannot be found out, he leads them to the very room in which it was committed. But soon the murderer begins to hear a recurrence of the heart beats, and convinced finally that the police can hear them too, he shrieks his confession of guilt: "Villains! . . . dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!"

What so brief a synopsis fails to clarify is the devices by which Poe makes this powerful story something more than a vivid melodrama. One device, although not of major importance, is the manner in which the insanity of the narrator is conveyed. When Baudelaire's translation of "The Tell-Tale Heart" first appeared in the French press he gave it a subtitle, "Plaidoyer d'un fou." He later suppressed the phrase, and rightly so, for the repeated and heated denials of insanity with which the story begins are wholly adequate indication of the mental state of the speaker. The cunning with which he went about his work was proof, for him, that he was not mad. But the cunning was far from perfect. Otherwise he would have had the foresight to oil the hinges of his dark lantern. That he should have neglected so essential a preparation refutes, on the level of his actions, what he too vehemently protests in his words.

But the engrossing interest this story has depends less on the general fact that the hero is mad than on the particular kind of madness that his case involves. What was the nature of his crime? He had no hatred for his victim. Quite the reverse: "I loved the old man." And so he casts about for a reason, a convincing motive: "I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." A simpler solution, but one which the criminal apparently did not consider, would have been to leave the house, a house of which we are told that only the two men lived there. That this solution did not occur to the murderer is one more indication of his mental derangement; but, more than this, it carries a suggestion of the strange relationship in which the two characters were involved. Thus the feelings of the old man when he awoke to discover his executioner at the door were feelings that the executioner could identify himself with:

He was still sitting up in the bed listening;—just as I have done night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall. Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief—oh no!—it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me.

He carried a lantern but had no need of it. Without its aid he was able to see the old man as he lay on his bed, although the time was midnight and the room was "black as pitch with the thick darkness." He could see him well enough with the mind's eye, Poe is implying here; for the act of murder in this story took place on a psychological as well as a physical level, and the nature and meaning of the crime must be sought in the psychology of the hero rather than in the immediately visible external details of his actions.

The murderer identified himself with his victim: "I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart." But what he did not know was that through this crime he was unconsciously seeking his own death. The shuttered lantern in his hand chanced to symbolize the thing he hated, the pale blue eye of the old man, the eye with a film over it. Whenever that eye fell on him, his blood ran cold. Thus he used the lantern to project a beam of light that filled the old man with terror, and in this way executioner and victim exchanged experiences. But so closely had the madman identified himself with his adversary that the murder he committed also brought on his own death. With unwitting irony he later tells the police that the scream heard during the night was his own, "in a dream." Objectively, this is false, for the scream was uttered by the old man. But subjectively, in the unconscious merging of himself and his victim, that cry was his own. And then at the end of the story another sound is to be identified, the beating of the tell-tale heart. By an amazing stroke, Poe brings in a detail that makes the story, if taken on a literal, realistic plane, patently absurd; but which, if interpreted for its psychological significance, becomes a brilliant climax to the hidden drama that has been unfolding. The ever-louder heartbeats heard by the criminal, are they, as he says, the sound of the beating of the old man's heart, that old man whose corpse has been dismembered and concealed under the planking in the room? Certainly not—on the plane of realistic and objective fact. It is the "hideous heart" of the criminal himself which he hears. But if we remember that the criminal sought his own death in that of his victim, and that he had in effect become the man who now lies dead, then what he tells the police is true. His conscious purpose was to lie to them about the earlier scream, but then, unconsciously, he told the truth. Now, consciously, he attempts to tell the truth, and this time he is unconsciously in error. And inevitably so. For his consciousness, his very being, had become intrinsicate with that of the man he killed, and with the extinction of his victim the power to separate illusion from reality became extinct in him and his madness was complete.