Part 1, pages 49-61 Summary

The narrator wakes the next afternoon, cold, uncomfortable, and starving. He begins to feel strange, and he considers pawning his borrowed blanket. He decides not to and feels proud of himself for his moral courage. He goes to check on the job he applied for and finds that he wrote the wrong date, 1848, on the letter. While the shopkeeper liked the letter, he gave the job to someone else.

Growing angry, the narrator blunders through the crowded streets and gets into an altercation with a passerby. Randomly, he walks into a building and knocks on a door on the third floor. The woman who answers the door assumes that he's begging, and the narrator is offended. He makes up a story that he's inquiring about a job taking a man in a wheelchair for outings, pretending to be a...