paul's case

Still dragging my eyes through Independence Day. It hasn't gotten any better. The main character is really getting on my nerves with his "existence period" and hypocrisy.

I don' t know about you, but I loved My Antonia and O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. In the workshop class, I came across a short story by her, which I had never read. It's more urban than her two novels. I like it.

We had to write an essay on it for the class, so I've included that here as well:

Paul has a contradictory temperament. At home and at school, places in which he feels he doesn’t belong, he is rude and distant. Yet at Carnegie Hall, he is “a model usher; gracious and smiling.” His clothes are “frayed and worn; but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his buttonhole.”

Paul’s primary character flaw is his lack of ambition to pursue an artistic and creative life, preferring instead to look on at those who have that life and to play the part of someone who would have that life. In essence, he has a life of disguises. “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...he found this existence [the theatre] so alluring, these smartly clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.” Perhaps if Paul had been encouraged to use his creativity, rather than watching others use theirs and merely putting on the disguise of one who has that life, he would have been happier.

Paul’s teachers don’t make an effort to get through to him. They state their cases against him with “such rancor and aggrievedness” and “fell upon him without mercy.” Only the drawing master shows anything like sympathy in his description of watching Paul sleeping and stating that the boy is “haunted” and “not strong.” After his hearing, Paul’s teachers do feel guilty for feeling “so vindictive toward a mere boy,” but they make no effort to do anything about it.

We only see Paul’s father through Paul’s eyes, so it’s difficult to judge him. Paul obviously doesn’t have a close relationship with his father, who begrudges giving him money for carfare and would reproach him for coming home late from work. Paul’s father does want him to succeed, encouraging him to earn his own money, but conversely, he compares him to another young man in the neighborhood instead of seeing Paul as his own person. It’s never good for a child’s confidence to hear from a parent, “Why can’t you be more like…?”

Paul enjoys his temporary time in the “fairy world” of New York, and quite possibly he could have gone on with it for awhile, but sooner or later he might have gotten bored with it and seen that it has its flaws just as his old life did. Paul is good at putting on facades, both with his teachers and friends as well as in New York, but how long can one sustain a façade that really isn’t one’s true self?

Finding out that his father has repaid the money he stole and is coming to take him home is the turning point for Paul. It is “worse than jail” because Paul fears and despises going back to his old life, and he has clearly failed to be the young man his father compared him to, and now his father knows it. At the moment he dies, if Paul repents anything, it is his life unlived – the possibility of what he could have seen beyond New York: “the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.” He did not think to find some way to go further than New York, which is puzzling. Only at the end does he realize he might have an alternative to going home or dying if he had made an effort rather than relying on illusion. That is his tragedy.