Paul's Case

“As the house filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the colour came to his cheeks and lips.”

This quote describes Paul’s feelings as he watches the performers at the concert hall. It is one of the first glimpses of Paul’s aesthetic passions. Notice how Cather describes him as essentially feeling more alive. Color is such an important part of Paul’s interior life, so it is significant when such artistic performances bring color to his complexion.

“He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendour.”

Similar to the previous quote, this line illuminates the feeling and meaning Paul gets from watching the performances at his work. These moments, which he must steal while he ushers concerts at work (events he likely could not afford to attend), are the only ones that color his unsatisfying Pittsburgh existence.

“In the moment that the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease.”

This passage exemplifies how Paul romanticizes the world. He was just following the German singer out of the hall and into a hotel. Again, he likely would not be allowed into such a luxurious place, so he is forced to imagine himself entering through the doors into this world of beauty.

“He approached it tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had when he came home.”

After the concert, Paul returns home, and the conditions of his dull existence rush back in. He finds his home common compared to the splendor of the theater and the life of its performers. Such realizations lead Paul to act out, and they propel his trip to New York City so he doesn’t have to feel an otherness in his own home.

“After each of these orgies of living, he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house permeated by kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavourless, colourless mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.”

The narration elucidates Paul’s feelings about his home existence, and in very expressive terms. Notably, psychological terms like “depression” describe his feelings. His distaste for his home life exceeds a dislike of ugly things; it is a condition that is making him depressed. It offers none of the elements he finds joy in: “cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.” 

“He was so much later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by his father tonight; that he could not toss again on that miserable bed. He would not go in.”

This quote offers the important detail that Paul’s father has disciplinarian tendencies, as the word “accost” suggests verbal threats or rudeness. The nature of this familial friction isn’t entirely clear, but later, when Paul hides in the basement, he does wonder if his father wants him dead. This suggests another factor as to why Paul hates his Pittsburgh life. However, next to the ugliness and colorlessness of Paul’s life on Cordelia Street, his father’s aggressive strictness is comparatively little discussed as a reason for Paul’s hatred of his home. 

“Perhaps it was because, in Paul’s world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty.”

Paul offers a very telling concept: He finds more pleasure in surface and artifice than in the natural, which is to say that he enjoys performance and color (a surface feature) to the natural, tangible world he inhabits in Pittsburgh. However, this passage also suggests that, as Paul has been trapped in Pittsburgh, his only experience of “natural” reality has been marked by such ugliness that it leads him to believe beauty requires artificiality.

“Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be.”

This short line encapsulates Paul’s mood after he moves to New York City. It highlights a major theme of the story: striving to become who one imagines oneself to be, to match that idealized self-image with actuality. In New York, Paul finally attains this. However, it is significant that Paul feels he is “the kind of boy” he’s always wanted, not the person. This suggests that Paul’s aspirations may have as much to do with status or social identity as with personal self-actualization.

“Here and there on the corners with flower gardens blooming behind glass windows, against which the snow flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley—somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow.”

Here, two of the essential symbols—snow and flowers—merge in a florid description of Paul’s life in New York. Most important here is the implicit comparison of Paul to a bloomed flower in the heart of winter, which is to say something beautiful that occurs during a harsh world.

“The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow flakes.”

Besides exemplifying the great lushness of Cather’s prose within the New York setting, this quote also aligns another external phenomenon—snowstorms—with Paul’s state of mind. It conveys that Paul feels at home in New York. 

“As he stepped into the thronged corridor, he sank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of colour—he had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to stand it.”

For the first time in Paul’s New York life, he feels discordant with his lavish and posh life. All the things that have brought him joy, that have made him feel at home and no longer alienated, now appear overwhelming. One could read this quote as showing the first cracks in the veneer of his New York City life, one that will eventually come to a tragic end.

“He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over.”

This sentence signifies the beginning of Paul’s demise. It is telling that Cather uses a metaphor to express this. As his perfect life is threatened, Paul feels as he did when the concerts would end in Pittsburgh: The beauty is over, and he now must return to the drabness of everyday life. The orchestra metaphor is also revealing because it directly implies that Paul’s life in New York is a performance.

“The carnations in his coat were drooping in the cold, he noticed; all their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run.”

This is perhaps the essential quotation of the short story as it serves two purposes. First, it expresses Paul’s true feelings (and, by extension, possibly Cather’s) about the reality of the world. Second, it ties the flower symbol, particularly the red carnations, into a fine knot that is woven through the whole story. Paul’s life resembles that of a flower: momentary bloom and beauty followed by wilting and death.