*SPOILERS*

I just finished reading The Crowd (I loved it) and was wondering what your takes on the people in the crowd itself are. The way I interpreted it is that the people that gather are there to watch certain areas and pick the people who live and die in accidents, kind of like grim reapers. I looked around the web briefly for other interpretations and could only find a tv adaptation that claimed the crowd members were actually accident victims who came back to the areas they died in. What are your opinions? By the way, has anyone ever seen the movie The Gathering? While reading The Crowd I could see the similarities and actually thought the movie was based off of the story, but I think they just ripped it off instead.

"The Crowd" is one of my favourite Bradbury stories, and one of his best. The people in the crowd are really quite complex - who/what they are depends on how you interpret the story.

If the hero is deluded, paranoid, then they might be purely figments of his imagination. Or they might be real people, but he might be deluded in thinking they are always the same people.

If he ISN'T deluded, then the crowd might be ghoulish rubberneckers, or they might be ghosts. I certainly like to see them as grim reapers, and this view makes the story thematically similar to a number of other Bradbury stories from the same period, such as "The Scythe". George Slusser (in his book "The Bradbury Chronicles") saw Bradbury's stories in this mode as being stories of the Calvinist elect. He makes a persuasive argument, although I don't know that here is any evidence that Bradbury himself was conscious of this interpretation at the time he wrote the story.

I find it interesting that when Bradbury re-imagined this story for his TV series, he moved it away from Slusser's interpretation, as he did with another "elect" story, "The Playground".

I reviewed the TV episode on my website a few years ago - the page is here.

I haven't seen The Gathering, but if it resembles "The Crowd" I would certainly like to see it.

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
"The Crowd" is one of my favourite Bradbury stories, and one of his best.

George Clayton Johnson thinks this is one of Ray's best short stories, too. He equates this to today's paparazzi suffocating swarms.

Thanks for all the speedy responses. That one above is a very interesting view of the story.

As usual, Bradbury doesn't ever tell us who these "people" are.

They seem "real", as Spallner always hear their footprints.

But they also seem like ghosts who are tied to the areas they were killed.

They are like grim reapers in that they appear at the time of death, and seem to have something to say about who lives and who dies. They are called judges and jurors and Spallner speculates (or intuits?) they are there "to make sure the rights ones live and the right ones die". They seem to appear unnaturally quickly at the sites.

Spallner has noticed that different crowds are tied to different locations--which follows several traditions where spirits linger at the locations where they died. Grim Reapers seem unlike ghosts in this sense. Also, like ghosts and ghouls, they are wearing the same clothes in each appearance--most likely the clothes they were wearing when they died.

At the end, when he realizes he'll be joining them, you can't guage his emotion. Is he passively accepting? Is it just inevitable and he has no feelings? I got no sense of panic or revulsion or fear or inevitability from the text. Why doesn't Ray give us a glimpse into his emotions at this point? Is Ray hiding something? Does he not know?

I also thought that maybe when Spallner closes his eyes and waits for the coroner it could mean that he has died and is now watching his body with the rest of the crowd.

That's an interesting perspective. But he seems to address them--implying he hasn't joined them yet. But you may very well be right. I like the idea.

"I see dead people!"

That seems to be the relevant observation of our main character, Mr. Spallner. The people in the crowd that he picks out never seem to grow old, and they always look the same thru the many years. They have always been dead and it doesn't matter how they got to be dead. What matters is they determine, to some extent, who continues to live and who dies. Mr. Spallner's obsessive interest in the dead from the very beginning is significant, since he finally does find the answer to who they are: he is joining them and has seen all their plans and now is privy to the fact they likely knew something about him and his investigations.

After the movie 'The Sixth Sense', these type of stories lose their edge if you are reading them for the first time. You have different detail and a different story line, of course, but it boils down to the final perspective: Mr. Spallner always has seen 'dead people'.

For me, part of the appeal of the story is WHY he sees dead people. Is this something special to Spallner? Is it something special to the fact that he is soon going to join them? Is it something that will happen to us all as our death approaches?

(Note: I don't want answers to these questions, and I'm glad the story doesn't give any concrete answers to them.)

philnic! Actually, you want to go to a deeper level?

Then maybe at first he doesn't see dead people, but just the kind of people that are attracted to death and death scenarios.

After that, there is this general sameness of character and personality that people have that are attracted to death, no matter what generation you live in. They just have that particular look. But when Spallner starts tracking these kind of peoples, he crosses some sort of invisible line whereby he sees another nature of these people, another connection that whispers across from one reality to some other. The former represent an archetype of the latter, which are the genuine dead people. They don't intentionally disguise themselves as living, but in the very nature of who they are, in the minute mannerisms and intricate fluid motions of their existence one sees another reality happening that over-rides any reality the average Joe on the street would see.

Now we see a new range of activity, one being the awareness of these people to the plans of Spallner. The situation of Spallner being in the accident is thus fore-ordained. He played with the unknown and forbidden, and is bitten by the 'charm' of meddling with things best left alone.

quote:

Originally posted by Nard Kordell:
...and is bitten by the 'charm' of meddling with things best left alone.

Nard, that's a neat analysis, and your last line sums the story up as a typical Weird Tale of this period.

Have you seen the TV version from Ray Bradbury Theater? If so, what od you think of the changes Bradbury made to the story? (Spallner doesn't die in this version.)

Pretty cool reading, Nard. One point, in your last line, though. Is it that there is a charm to not letting things alone, or that, in a Poe sense, they become obsessed and can't let it alone. In this, it's similar to the character in The Skeleton, who becomes so obsessed with the actuality of his skeleton that he becomes a jellyfish, rather than retaining the skeleton.

I would say the latter. Or perhaps an initial charm which later becomes an obsession. That would be another invisible line that Spallner crosses.

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:

Have you seen the TV version from Ray Bradbury Theater? If so, what do you think of the changes Bradbury made to the story? (Spallner doesn't die in this version.)

Didn't see the TV version. Figure it's available in DVD!

It is on DVD, yes, and at a very reasonable price.