Abstract:Abstract: In the past interpretations of the short story The Last Leaf, the commentators tended to decode the figure of Mr. Behrman as a great man in nature, which neglected his alienation identity. Based on Marginality theory, we try to uncover the man’s identity in his community environment. A mode of decoding Marginal Man in the literary text is proposed, with which it is found that Mr. Behrman is a marginal man in the verbal depiction and non-verbal community. His correspondent figure is squeezed to a small text space to cover and his social dialect reveals that Mr. Behrman’s covert identity is an African-American; Mr. Behrman’s body is alienated to the soul’s opposite, which leads to his ultimate death for inferiority compensation.