Plot Overview

Paul has been suspended from his high school in Pittsburgh. As the story opens, he arrives at a meeting with the schools faculty members and principal. He is dressed in clothes that are simultaneously shabby and debonair. The red carnation he wears in his buttonhole particularly offends the faculty members, who think the flower sums up Pauls flippant attitude. Paul is tall and narrow-shouldered, with enlarged pupils that remind one of a drug addicts eyes. The faculty members have a difficult time articulating their true feelings about Paul. Deep down, they believe that Paul loathes, feels contempt for, and is repulsed by them. They lash out at Paul, but he betrays no emotion. Instead, he smiles throughout the barrage of criticism. After Paul leaves, the drawing master says aloud that Pauls mother died in Colorado just after Paul was born. Privately, the drawing master remembers seeing Paul asleep one day in class and being shocked at his aged appearance. As the teachers depart, they feel embarrassed about their viciousness toward Paul. Paul goes straight to Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh, where he works as an usher. Because he is early, he goes to the Halls gallery and looks at paintings of Paris and Venice. He loses himself in one particular painting, a blue Rico. After changing in the dressing room, where he roughhouses with the other ushers, Paul begins to work. He is excellent at his job, performing every aspect of it with great enthusiasm. He is annoyed when his English teacher arrives and he must seat her, but he comforts himself with the knowledge that her clothes are inappropriate for so fancy a venue. The symphony begins, and Paul loses himself in the music. As he listens, he feels full of life. After the performance, he trails the star soprano to her hotel, the Schenley, and imagines vividly that he is following her inside the luxurious building. As if awaking from a dream, Paul realizes that he is actually standing in the cold, rainy street. He dreads returning to his room, with its ugly knickknacks and pictures of John Calvin and George Washington. As he reaches Cordelia Street, where he lives, Paul feels depressed and repulsed by the commonness and ordinariness of his middle-class neighbourhood. Unable to face his father, Paul sneaks into the basement, where he stays awake all night imagining what would happen if his father mistook him for a burglar and shot himor recognized Paul in time, but later in life wished that he had shot his son. The next day, Paul sits on the porch with his sisters and father. Many people are outside, relaxing. It is a pleasant scene, but Paul is disgusted by it. His father chats with a young clerk whom he hopes Paul will emulate. This clerk took his bosss advice: he married the first woman he could and began having children immediately. The only tales of business that interest Paul are those of the iron magnates expensive adventures in Cairo, Venice, and Monte Carlo. He understands that some cash boys (low-level employees) eventually find great success, but he does not enjoy thinking about the initial cash-boy work.

After managing to get carfare from his father by pretending that he needs to study with a friend, Paul goes to see Charley Edwards, a young actor who lets Paul hang around his dressing room and watch rehearsals. The narrator notes that Pauls mind has not been perverted by novels, as his teachers suspect. Rather, Paul gets pleasure solely from theater and music, which are the only things that make him feel alive. At school, Paul tells outrageous lies about his close friendships with the members of the theater company and the stars who perform at Carnegie Hall. Pauls effort to prove that he is better than his classmates and teachers winds up alienating him from them. In the end, the principal speaks with Pauls father, and Paul is forbidden to return to school, Carnegie Hall, or the theater where Charley Edwards works. The theater companys members hear about Pauls lies and find them comical. Their lives are difficult, not the glamorous dream worlds that Paul imagines. Paul takes an overnight train and arrives in New York City, where he buys expensive clothes, hats, and shoes. After purchasing silver at Tiffanys, he checks into the Waldorf, paying for his rooms in advance. The eighth-floor rooms are nearly perfect. All thats missing are flowers, which Paul sends a bellboy out to buy. The narrator explains what has happened to make all this possible: Paul got a job with Denny & Carsons, and when asked to take a deposit to the bank, he deposited only the checks and pocketed $1,000 in cash. He is using this stolen money to fund his spree in New York. After a nap, Paul takes a carriage ride up Fifth Avenue. He notices banks of flowers, bright and vibrant, protected by glass from the snow. He dines at the hotel while listening to an orchestra play the Blue Danube. He feels utterly content. The next day, Paul meets a rich boy who attends Yale. The two of them enjoy a night on the town, staying out until 7 a.m. The narrator notes that although the boys begin the evening in a happy mood, they end it in a bad one. A lovely week passes, and then Paul finds that his theft has been discovered and reported by the Pittsburgh newspapers. According to the stories, his father has paid back the $1,000 and is headed to New York to find his son. Paul enjoys one last dinner at the Waldorf. The next morning, he wakes up, hungover, and looks at the gun he purchased on his first day in New York. In the end, he takes cabs to a set of railroad tracks in Pennsylvania and leaps in front of an oncoming train. Before he dies, he recognizes the folly of his haste and thinks of the places that he will never see.

A Clinical View of a Suicidal Young Man

Pauls Case is notable for its complete absence of dramatized scenes. Typically, shortstory writers strive for a balance of exposition (discourse in which the narrator simply provides information and description for the reader) and dramatization (fully drawn scenes in which characters speak to each other). Pauls Case is composed entirely of exposition. It contains only three pieces of dialogue: Pauls weak explanation of his bad behavior, the art teachers mention of Pauls mothers death, and the young clerks awed account of his bosss productivity. Even these words of dialogue come in the midst of exposition. The storys subtitle, A Study in Temperament, provides the explanation for this unusual structure. Cather is less interested in writing a traditional short story than she is in providing a case study of a suicidal young man. Each piece of exposition explains or elaborates on a motivation for Pauls eventual suicide. By the time Paul leaps in front of the train, we recognize a number of reasons for his action: the death of his mother, 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. By doing away with dramatized scenes, Cather produces the effect of a story extrapolated from a doctors notes on the causes of a patients suicide. Modern critics have diagnosed Paul as delusional and narcissistic. These terms were not in common usage when Pauls Case was first published; Cather wrote the story several years before Freud became popular in America. However, the story certainly anticipates Americas fascination with analysis, and Cathers subtitle emphasizes her own interest in studying Pauls psyche.

The Self-Absorption of the Clinically Depressed

Pauls Case is intentionally claustrophobic. Told in close third-person narration, it hardly ever strays outside the confines of Pauls mind. This extremely focused point of view conveys the intense self-involvement of deeply unhappy people. Paul is so wrapped up in his own depression that he cannot think about others. Not until midway through the story do we learn about the existence of Pauls sisters. Even then, they are mentioned only in passing and never named. After using one of them to justify a lie to his classmates, Paul never thinks or speaks about them again. He doesnt consider the feelings of his father, who lost his wife when his children were very young. Instead, he dismisses his father as an annoyance to be avoided and lied to. It doesnt occur to him that his father worries about his whereabouts only because he loves him. Paul also never thinks about what it means that his father paid back the money he stole and set out for New York to find him. Like the sisters, Pauls father is never named. Cathers tight focus on Pauls point of view mirrors his self-absorption. His egoism blots out everyone, not just his family. The only people he observes with interest are those he idealizesand he fails to see them as they really are. The soprano, Charley Edwards, and the Yale student are not real people for Paul but rather figures in a fantasyland of theater

and money. He imagines that the soprano is a queen of romance, when in fact she is a middle-aged mother of several kids. He believes that Charley walks through a magic portal into the theater world, when Charley is actually a youngster in an unremarkable local troupe. He views the Yale student as the boy he himself was meant to be, when in reality the two can hardly get along for the space of one night. Whether Paul is ignoring the people who love him or fantasizing about those who hardly know him, he demonstrates his inability to think of anyone but himself. Even in the seconds before he dies, his last thought is for the places he wont get to see, rather than the family members who will mourn his death.

Pauls Scorn for the Middle Class

Some of the most memorable passages in Pauls Case are the descriptions of Pauls neighborhood, which seethe with anger and resentment. Pauls beloved worlds of theater and money are often described in vague terms because Paul knows almost nothing real about them. In contrast, the world of Cordelia Street brims with concrete details, and it is these details that are so upsetting to Paul. The narrator describes Pauls wooden bed, the cushions on which the housewives sit, the bellies of the men, the conversations about the childrens progress in school, and the portraits of George Washington and John Calvin that hang in Pauls room. The details that horrify Paul the most get repeated: the yellow wallpaper, smell of cooking, and love of arithmetic. The repetition of these details reveals the class hatred that plays continuously in Pauls mind. Every mention of the neighborhood and its trappings drips with loathing. Paul hates the piety and work ethic of the people he comes from. He despises the very place that is most real in his mind and longs for the abstract world of the upper class. The angry tone of these passages brings up an issue that recurs throughout the story: the extent to which the narratorand, by extension, Cathersympathizes with Paul. On first reading, it is tempting to conclude that the narrator presents Paul as a hero or at least a traditional protagonist. We might assume that the narrator considers Pauls suicide the only way out of a world that does not understand him. A closer look, however, shows that the narrator is highly critical of Paul. In the passages about his middle-class neighborhood, the narrator is showing, rather than sharing, Pauls fury. Cather wants her readers to understand that despite what Paul believes, the residents of Cordelia Street are actually hardworking, decent people. And although Pauls depression is treated with sympathy, his scornfulness and other shortcomings are not. Cather asks us to recognize that Pauls anger at his family and his neighbors is the typical product of teenage sullenness, not a valid or romantic reason for suicide.