Custom essays on Paul’s Case by Willa Cather

The short story under consideration by Willa Siebert Cather, American twentieth-century writer, is entitled “Paul’s Case” and subtitled “A Study in Temperament”. The story vividly shows readers the way a young artistically-minded man struggles with his identity in the commercial world that surround him and refuses to go with the stream as his peers do. The work was first published in Cather’s first collection of short stories “The Troll Garden” in 1905. The protagonist Paul appears in the descriptions of other people, in terms of characterization of his feelings and depiction of what he likes and dislikes. And what is accentuated in uncovering his feelings and emotions, revealing the nature of his internal and external conflicts is description of his preferences in life, his attitude to things that surround him, the locations and family, the school and theatrical acquaintances. The matter is that in the eyes of his teachers and family Paul seems abnormal and misunderstood. But one cannot assign blame for his suicide only on his school misdemeanors or generation gap. Paul’s upbringing, his critical world perception, inability to cope with the hardships he faces and his aversion for the reality combined with unrealized desire to escape from the routine of life contributed to drove him to killing himself under a speeding locomotive. If to consider Paul’s world, we easily find evidence that it “nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty”(Cather). He fenced himself from the rest of the world, therefore, he did not expect people understand his feelings, “was quite accustomed to lying” (Cather). He could tell incredible stories about his famous acquaintances and imaginary unrealized trips to different countries. He was conscious that he was being watched, so he was always smiling. Teachers who never support his choices accuse him of disorder and impertinence “which lay in a sort of hysterically deviant manner of the boy’s” (Cather). Even in class he sat with his hand shading his eyes, it testified to his reticence and unwillingness to reveal himself, even manifested indifference towards the people surrounding him, teachers inclusively.

Having been accused of impoliteness, he parried: “I guess it’s a sort of way I have of saying things regardless”. His specific attitude towards teachers associated with his flippantly red carnation flower that looked theoretical, and generally, the staff never tried to understand Paul, and strictly never succeeded in it. One of the teachers said: “There’s something sort of haunted about it…There is something wrong about the fellow” (Cather). Actually, teachers were too preoccupied with their business and confused his individual mode of thought with imagination perverted by garish fiction.
In contrast to what Paul felt in Cordelia Street, the boy feels truly alive and full of energy at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall with Cordelia Street representing the world he tried to escape from, and the streets of New York are the embodiment of idealistic society with a completely different lifestyle that he as a daydreamer clearly imagined. Moreover, he feared his father, terrified with the noise he could possibly make and enrage him. The theatre was his “secret temple”, the only place where he felt safe and comfortable, this was his fairytale, where “he breathed like a prisoner set free (Cather)”. At the same time he found no satisfaction in “fooling with theorems” or playing up to people to get noticed.
Wishing to escape reality Paul goes to New York, the trip where he has planned a hundred times. Despite his tiredness and fear of being noticed as he runs from home, he realizes that he has always feared that someone watches him and that appeared exhausting. He felt a deceptive “curious sense of relief” as though he had managed to break free from his dreary life. He enjoy the atmosphere of New York and the omnipotence of wealth and even doubted the reality of his past, but he chose not a best way to achieve that inner comfort as he took his father’s money whose figure standing at the top of the stairs would be kept in his mind. Not occasionally the boy “had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over” (Cather). He seemed to be happy those days in New York finding pleasure in simple things like winter twilights, flowers and sense of power, the sense that no one tells him how to behave. Still, it was not what he wanted to achieve, he became aware of the fact that he was short of money and “the wall stood between all he loathed and all he wanted” (Cather). in the course of the story one cannot help but feel the growing tension, and the boy’s mind worked feverishly, unable to cope with the ache in his head and lost his inner battle, all his speculations were over as the reality caught up with him. Cather writes that Paul jumped as the right moment came, the boy chose the moment to end up with suffering. he manifested weakness and at the same time he found courage not to accept things others humbly do. So, Paul felt “the folly vastness of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he left undone”. The final jump was the last straw for the boy and he left the rest of the world to blame in his shooting Niagara. All his short life he was looking for some delusive dream-world that the life was unable to give.