I enjoyed reading the short story ‘Paul’s Case’ by Willa Cather. I would consider Paul as a troubled child who was having a hard life. I found that the red carnations were a symbol throughout this short story. The red carnations that Paul often wears in his buttonholes represent him. At the opening of the story, when Paul wears a red carnation to meet his teachers and the principal, the adults correctly interpret the red carnations as evidence of Paul’s continued disobedience. The teacher and principal would like for Paul to show some remorse, but the brisk flower proves that he feels none. At the conclusion of the story, Paul buys red carnations. As he is walking towards the train tracks, he observes that the carnations have wilted in the cold. Paul then buries one of the flowers in the snow before he leaps in front of the train. The burial of the carnations is a symbolic prelude to Paul’s actual suicide.
Paul never truly fits in anywhere nor does he ever feel comfortable in his own body. He is moving through his world uncomfortably. Paul is obsessed with art, theater, and music. His job at Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh allows him to indulge in his obsessions. Paul has an impractical idea that the art world is an ideal fantasyland. He uses art as a drug to escape his miserable existence. Paul never has a desire to join the art world that he so admires, instead, he only wants to sit back and observe other people. Paul feels disrespect for his teachers, classmates, neighbors, and family members, all of whom he sees as completely narrow-minded.
Paul is also obsessed with money. He wants to be rich and he believes that great wealth is in his future. Paul lies constantly in order to get out of a sticky situation and sometimes just to impress his classmates and teachers because of his selfishness and desperation to escape his own understated life. Cather makes it very clear that Paul has homosexual tendencies even though it is never clear if he acknowledges or acts upon them. Paul feels isolated from society because of his homosexuality and his general despise for other people.
Paul’s self-destructive desires strengthen throughout the story. He first wishes to escape life by submerging himself in art. Cather’s language suggests his longing for silence, when he is standing outside of the soprano’s house and listening to the symphony. Paul wants to let art take him away, “blue league after blue league, away from everything.” He spend one entire night imagining what would happen if his father mistakenly thought that he was a burglar and shot him. Paul also imagines what would happen if his father did not regret killing him. The inference from all these images is that Paul believes that one day he will fail and disgust his father so significantly that his father will wish him dead. Near the end of the story, we learn that Paul bought a gun when he arrived in New York because even at the beginning of his adventure, he anticipated that he might need “a way to snap the thread.” The narrator mentions darkness in Paul several times throughout the story. This darkness that is mentioned is a fear that he has felt since he was a child. In the end, Paul ultimately commits suicide but not because of only one event or one character trait. All of his causes for misery, isolation, and alienation are what leads him to leap in front of a train.
Works Cited
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2007. Web. 2 March. 2011
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