The chapter is in the first person throughout, and the identity of the speaker is one of the standing questions about the book.
Tradition assigns the work to Laozi, an older contemporary of Confucius who served as an archivist and wrote the book at a frontier pass on his way out of the country. The earliest sustained account of him, in the Han historian Sima Qian's great record, is itself uncertain: it offers more than one candidate for who he was, admits that nobody knew what became of him, and gives conflicting information about his dates. A historian writing in the second or first century before the common era was already unable to settle the question.
Modern scholarship has not settled it either, and the manuscript evidence pushes in a different direction. Material corresponding to this text appears in bamboo slips from a tomb at Guodian in bundles that carry no author, no frontier pass and no Dao and De division, and the repetition of formulae across chapters is what a compilation looks like rather than what a single composition looks like.
Which makes the first person here worth reading carefully. Whoever assembled these sayings gave them a voice, and the voice is consistent: isolated in chapter twenty, teaching in chapter forty-two, complained about in chapter sixty-seven, and here unread. It is a persona and it may be more than one person's.
The atlas records the book's traditional attribution because that attribution is itself a historical fact about how the text has been received, and records the doubt alongside it.