How did Paul de Man interpret the isolated woodsman in William Wordsworth’s The Excursion?

In his essay "Autobiography as De-Facement," Paul de Man interprets the mute, isolated woodsman from William Wordsworth’s poem The Excursion as a profound embodiment of humanity in its "abysmal loneliness."1

While Wordsworth suggests that the woodsman finds redemption through the grace of the Sun, de Man focuses on the figure's inability to perceive the world beyond visual imagery—noting that even the sound of a waterfall remains inaccessible to him, existing only as a picture. De Man views this character as a representative of the human condition, ultimately linking the woodsman’s state to his own philosophical conclusion that "death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament." He further compares this figure to the "listener" in Wallace Stevens’s poetry, characterizing him as one who beholds "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."1