Paul's Case
...elia Street was littered with cookie cutter houses, suburbanite-like city-dwellers, and a general aura of despair. Paul’s room was no different. Paul feels as though he could not stand "the sight of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold bath-room with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, and the dripping spigots"(Cather, pg. 250). Paul’s school and home symbolize the ordinary nature, and general ugliness of his life. Paul worked at Carnegie Hall as an usher. It is here that Paul's real love lies. Paul lost himself in the music of the symphonies, the characters of the plays, and in the artful scenery. Paul also enjoyed gallery art, as evidenced by the hours he spends in an art gallery, staring at one painting, before his shift at Carnegie one night. It is at Carnegie Hall that Paul became struck by the glitter and the starlight of the stage. He was not star struck in the sense that he wanted to perform in any way, he was simply content to observe others' performances. He is struck in the sense that he wants to live the way the characters in the plays do. Paul felt that his abusive father, uncaring teachers, and classmates who misunderstand him were not worthy of his presence and company. So Paul decided to run away. Denny and Carson, Paul’s bosses came to entrust Paul with the week's payroll. His responsibility was to take it to the bank and make the deposit. One weekend, however, Paul was instructed to take the ledger in to be balanced, and Paul knew about it ahead of time. When he took the deposit down to the bank on Friday, Paul pocketed nearly one thousand dollars from the cash in the deposit. Paul boarded a train on Saturday bound for New York City. Paul's could not wait to enter the lavish world of the stylish and wealthy. Clark 3 Paul spent little more than a week in New York City, living the good life, the life to which he wishes he was born. He wore the finest clothes, ate the finest food, and lived in the finest room. Unfortunately for Paul, however, his money, and his luck, eventually ran out. Paul spent all the money he had stolen within eight days. Paul's father also came looking for him on the eighth day as well. Paul would have to return to Pittsburgh. However, Paul did not ride the train back to Pittsburgh in the way that the reader would expect. Instead, he jumps in front of one, committing suicide. At the beginning of the story, Paul appears with a red carnation in his buttonhole, the first thing Paul does in his New York hotel room is to request flowers from the bellboy, and his final act before committing suicide is to bury, in the snow, one of the carnations from his coat. These recurring images of flowers symbolize Paul's desire for beauty, and, at the same time, his fragility. The violent red of the carnations symbolizes his defiance of both his teachers and the residents of Cordelia Street, as well as of all the middle-class values that they represent. At the end, the drooping carnations show Paul's depression and impending death. In contrast to the red of the carnation, blue appears in the story as airy and unearthly, the color of the sky and of Paul's dreams. In the picture gallery of Carnegie Hall, Paul sits down before a "blue Rico" (Cather, pg. 247) and loses himself. Paul's true desire, which lies behind all of his actions, is "to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything” (Cather, pg. 247). Light represents Paul's aspirations: the windows of the opera singer's hotel had an "orange glow", and, in New York, the "lights streamed from the hotels that reared their dozen stories fearlessly up into the Clark 4 storm" (Cather, pg. 256). Paul wants to be able to stand, fearless of the commoners of Cordelia Street, letting his own light stream out into the storm. Darkness, meanwhile, represents the wall that keeps Paul from reaching his goal. Paul waits outside the opera singer's hotel, wondering whether he...