The story contains a famous Poe quote at its beginning, "There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told." So the story warns us right away not to expect answers. The narrator watches the crowd and eventually follows the strange man and learns next to nothing. You could say as much for most of the other people in the crowd he observes and draws inferences about. He recognises office workers and pickpockets, "men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own." I'm reminded of Bob Dylan's line in "Like a Rolling Stone", "You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal." I suppose having no secrets amounts to being entirely secret because humanity stripped of persona and art can only be the enigma of human consciousness itself.
The unnamed narrator of the story says he recently recovered from illness and says he, "found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs." I think I know what he's talking about, I remember feeling that way after physically taxing illness or exercise. It's like you become a perfect eye with all senses receptive to the world. In this peculiarly active, passive state, one enigmatic figure in the crowd arrests the narrator's attention who, being unnamed and undescribed, slyly substitutes itself for all the reader's faculty for input. It's been suggested that the sinister man is a reflection of the observer, which may as well be so. But just as we are what we eat, perhaps we are what we see. That which repels and that which attracts the observer allow us a sort of echo map of the observer. The fact that the observer decides to follow the man all night and into the next day certainly speaks volumes.
There are a number of AI generated audiobooks of the story on YouTube. Already! How quickly AI is plastering over reality. Here's one that's not AI. At least, I can't imagine AI being so affected:
The narrator describes the man with a number of contradictory elements: "As I endeavoured, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, 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 bloodthirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of extreme despair." To me, this sounds like an addict. The fact that the man compulsively seeks to be in crowds without seeming to focus on individuals suggests to me that he's addicted to crowds. I guess there really is a fetish for everything. He seems like a kind of vampire, an idea borne out in various illustrations of him, particularly in Harry Clarke's lurid 1923 illustration.
Perhaps this is a vampire who feeds on the very discomfort of being in a crowd. The story begins with an epigraph, a quote from a French book: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul", "This great misfortune, of not being able to be alone." Perhaps the man literally is this misfortune, anthropomorphised. He is the denial of solitude given face. He anticipates Satre's famous quote, "Hell is other people." The idea of him being a reflection of the narrator works well with this because the perceptions of others do function as a mirror.
In any case, with this story Poe certainly shows his genius for making something so simple so powerful.
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