Analysis Of Paul's Case By Willa Cather

The short story, “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather, opens with a young boy called before his high school principal and teachers. They are unable to discern exactly what the boy’s problem is but they know that his offenses are many and that, mainly, he annoys them. He is bored with school and hates his shabby room at home and his middle-class neighbors and the street where he lives. Paul’s real love, his only true mental and spiritual life, seems to be realized in the glamour and color of the world of theater and music. Paul creates for himself a fantasy life that forces him to lie continuously. His need for the “fairy tale” world that he tasted “behind the scenes” drives him to a plan that seems obvious to him and not even a struggle for him

as he executes it. Cather tells the tale of a young boy's struggle to separate himself from his common, everyday life and the people he shared it with.

Cather's purpose was to show that, by focusing on what he did not have, Paul could not live at all.
Paul surrounds himself with the aesthetics of music and the rich and wealthy, as a means to escape his true reality. Although Paul feels happiest and most alive when he is surrounded by art at the theater, listening to music, or gazing at paintings his happiness is an illusion because he does not truly understand what he sees. Instead, he consumes art voraciously and unthinkingly, as if it was an addictive drug. As an illustration, the music at Carnegie Hall means nothing to Paul, he loves it because it frees “some hilarious and potent spirit within him.” This describes an involuntary but highly pleasurable reaction, similar to the reaction inspired by addiction. Similarly, to addicts escaping their everyday lives

when using drugs, Paul uses art to escape his own consciousness. Theater, music, and paintings provide Paul with instant, though shallow, gratification. Cather suggests strongly that Paul has homosexual leanings that make his life difficult and contribute to how alienated he feels from others. Paul’s homosexuality makes him feel deeply alienated from society. Although he seems to achieve a certain acceptance from a few groups and individuals, the details are so vague that one can assume the acceptance was hardly overt or fulfilling. He has no close friends, and the narrator suggests that his advances are often rebuffed. He travels to New York to find others like himself, in order to be free and not feel like an outcast. When Paul meets the rich student from Yale, he makes a brief connection, and the two share a wild night out on the town. But although their friendship begins with “confiding warmth,” they part coldly. Like always, Paul is left alone and his solidarity descent into desperation.

Paul believes that beauty, is superficial, and to become beautiful, he must be around it.

In order for Paul to become “beautiful,” he steals money from his job and buys a train ticket to New York. There he buys expensive clothes, hats, shoes, jewelry, and books a suite at the Waldorf. Paul believes that money can solve all his problems, but it only leads to unrelenting disappointment. The only solution for him to get out of the existence he loathes is money. As the story continues on, Cather makes it clear that Paul will never become the men he idolizes since he does not understand the relationship between money and work. His obsession with money and failure to understand it ultimately caused his downfall. At the beginning of the story, when Paul wears a red carnation to meet his teachers and principal, the adults correctly interpret its presence as evidence of Paul’s continued defiance, “His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack.” When Paul realizes that his time among "the beautiful" is expiring, he is outside in the snow near a railroad. His dream dying, he begins to wilt like the carnations on his jacket, "their red glory over," "It was only one splendid breath they had," and Paul felt "it had paid indeed.” The carnation’s burial is a symbolic prelude to Paul’s actual suicide. Paul admired the opulence of the

theater, the wardrobe, the perfumes, the lights, the colors, the flowers, and the champagne. When he realized it was not possible to have these things, he threw his life away The contrast with the last few days of his fairy-tale life is too much for him, and he takes the final steps that lead to his suicide. Thus the author closes Paul’s case.
By the time Paul leaps in front of the train, there are a number of reasons for his action: his longing to join the upper class, his idealized love for the arts, his homosexual tendencies, his alienation from society, and his impossible craving for money. Paul admired the opulence of the theater, the wardrobe, the perfumes, the lights, the colors, the flowers, and the champagne. Paul loved and craved refinement and beauty and loathed the ugly, the brutal and the mundane.