Pauls case willa cather. Paul's Case by Willa Cather 2022-10-25
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Paul's Case Full Text
He quickly touched his coat pocket. The insult was so involuntary and definitely personal as to be unforgettable. Then everything turned black and Paul dropped back into the great design of things. When he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open. He remembered every feature of both his drivers, the toothless old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, near-sighted eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved about his ears. He finds it superior than his normal life.
Without facing his father, he moves to cellar and spend the night. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands. The salesman was very polite when he saw Paul's money. He told the salesman he wanted to wear one of the new suits and the coat immediately. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o'clock the next morning.
Response to "Paul's Case." The Willa Cather Short Story Project • Chris Wolak • Stay Curious
It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of suspension. Presently he came out of his white bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe. When he returns to the hotel, he feels overwhelmed by the sensory pleasures and visual spectacle of the hotel dining room, as well as by the Opera that he attends later that night. He had not seen them yet! There is something wrong about the fellow. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged looking business men boarded the early car? Today Paul's father, on the top step, was talking to a young man who shifted a restless baby from knee to knee.
As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. As such, the escalation of the level of temperament can affect the rationality of the decisions made by Paul, as seen at the end where he stands in front of an oncoming train. He happened to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his father's dearest hope that he would pattern. He went around to the back of the house and tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. The rumour had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks protruded black above it.
Some readers have suggested that Paul is an example of the weakwilled person for whom art can become a selfish escape. This the girls thought very fine, and the neighbours joked about the suspicious colour of the pitcher. His last thoughts are of colorful, exotic locales like Algeria and the Adriatic Sea, before all goes black. He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again to attacks of nausea. He had been suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the principal's office and confessed his perplexity about his son. The Park itself was a wonderful stage winter-piece.
When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin above his bed. For instance, Paul regards the Charley Edwards as a magical theatre star, yet, in the real sense, Charley is an upcoming performer in the local troupe. Older boys than Paul had broken down and shed tears under that baptism of fire, but his set smile did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that held his hat. The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy. Paul joins the new job. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to his pocket. He also lacked a mother, and we know little about what the protofeminist Cather might have said about that lack, nor whether in this early story we are meant to read "Paula" for "Paul.
But the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too uncertain then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always to be watching him--and Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew. Paul suddenly remembered all the flowers he had seen in a shop window his first night in New York. He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He asked Paul whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. This is why he lives for the moment.
Summary and Theme of Paul's Case by Willa Cather/Class 12 Major English (New Course)
He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a joke, anyway. The children played in the streets; there were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of a kindergarten. It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined. Paul had lived on Cordelia Street, which he found depressing. He remembers different past activities with his father to entertain himself. They occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress at school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in their toy banks.
. He is taken out of school and put to work at an entry-level office job and Charley is compelled to promise not to see Paul again. As the taxi stopped for a red light Paul noticed a flower shop. If he had to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. Upon returning home very late that night, Paul enters through the basement window to avoid a confrontation with his father. There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made; but the floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected silver mounted brushes and a scarf-pin.
