Analysis of Paul's Case

The story of Paul’s Case is one of a struggling teenage boy, named Paul, who is trying to find his true self. Paul wants to belong and he thinks he belongs to the “high society,” but his teachers and father refuse to go along with his thoughts and wants. The reader connects with Paul and his tribulations throughout the story. His conflicts are with his teachers and father. Their opinion of Paul is a troubled and unusual boy however, from his perspective he is simply misunderstood. He wants so badly to become part of the glamorous lifestyle he sees in theatres that it eventually consumes him to the point where he does not want to leave it, and he ends up killing himself.

As the story begins the reader sees Paul getting ready to go before a group of his former teachers. Paul’s character is portrayed as being a liar in the beginning, “Paul was quite accustomed to lying: found it, indeed, indispensable for overcoming friction” (eFictions, 79). He seemed to be a typical teenage boy, cutting up in the classroom, making a humorous “running commentary” on a lecture from his teacher in one of his classes. At the meeting Paul stood, with a red carnation, with a smile of defiance. His teachers lit into him,”®which they did with such a rancor and aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case” (eFictions, 79). He is taken out of school and put to work for a stock company.

Paul felt he really lived at the theatre and Carnegie Hall. He felt that was where he belonged. He enters the picture gallery where he, “®sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself” (eFictions, 81). He liked working as an usher for the theatre. “He was a model usher. Gracious and smiling he ran up and down the aisles” (eFictions, 81). After the concerts were over, Paul often daydreamed about the Schenley, “®watching the people go in and out, longing to enter and leave schoolmasters and dull care behind him forever” (eFicitons, 82).

Paul is a person with imaginings of a better life, just like everyone else. However, He went to extreme measures to make that dream a reality. Paul decides to do something drastic,“®he had been sent to the bank with Denny and Carson’s deposit®There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the banknotes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to his pocket” (eFictions, 88). Paul actually steals the money and travels to New York, to the Waldorf. Even though he had an exciting few days in New York, he still looked upon his life as being, “®the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become Cordelia Street” (eFictions, 91). He has a finite amount