Paul’s Case: Part 1 Summary & Analysis

The beginning of the story characterizes Paul as someone at odds with his environment, and defiantly so—refusing to appear either anxious or contrite about his suspension.

Paul’s changing clothing will be an important marker of his yearning and process of self-discovery throughout the story, while the red carnation remains a consistent, deeply symbolic, element of his dress. The carnation is the flamboyant symbol of his difference, his effeminacy, and his illicit homosexuality—which, though never addressed in explicit terms, is made clear throughout the story beginning with this description of his dandyish outfit.

The narrator describes Paul’s lying as something he feels he must do, while also employing the clinical language (i.e., Paul’s “case”) through which other people try to understand Paul’s strange behavior.

Paul’s sense of alienation from his environment is described in visceral terms as something that affects his body as well as his mind. These descriptions also reveal the contrast between the jaunty, defiant stance that Paul takes in response to his teacher’s complaints, and his insecurity and sense of being scrutinized, as signaled by his shaking fingers.

Paul’s bow, like his red carnation, is seen as insolent in large part because it’s so theatrical. He treats the whole event as a show that fails to affect him.

Paul is incomprehensible to his teachers, who vaguely grasp that something more is going on than the normal rudeness of a student. The story emphasizes such an inability to understand Paul as part of the tragedy of his alienation.

Paul is often described as responding to moments of anxiety or stress with wild gestures or movements, running or jumping or whistling, as if to shake off his feelings of oppression by playing with and stretching his own body to its limits. His overflow of energy gets channeled in part into a performativity and a concern for aesthetic beauty. In the description of his dynamic with the other ushers, there is the implication that he enjoys provoking other boys in part because it gives him the excuse to engage with them physically. That Paul’s nerves are calmed by having the other boys “suppress” him by sitting atop him is another clear instance of Cather’s use of innuendo to alert the reader to Paul’s queerness.

To Paul, Carnegie Hall represents an alternative universe, one distant from and entirely unlike his drab, oppressive school, so he has to find a way to explain his teacher’s presence there. 

Paul uses the music at Carnegie Hall to escape the more unpleasant realities of his daily life. He marvels at the soloist’s tiara and gown, demonstrating further his rapt interest in feminine things that most boys don’t even notice.

Paul’s voyeurism is shown to stem from a longing to escape his own everyday life as a Pittsburgh schoolboy, even as that longing is revealed to be based on an unrealistic view of the life of a traveling musician. There is a real contrast between the warm hotel and the frigid street outside, and the window both joins and divides the two. The glowing warmth of Paul’s vision of the hotel is a testament to the ways in which he has glamorized and romanticized that world. The word “fairy” was common slang for a gay man—making its use here another clear instance of Cather’s use of innuendo to alert the reader to Paul’s queerness.

“Feed my lambs” is a line from scripture spoken by Jesus before his death. Other characters in the story will try to explain Paul’s behavior by the fact that his mother has died, but this brief mention seems to suggest that he barely thinks of her. The pictures of men above his bed are another hint of his homosexuality. The yellow wallpaper becomes a symbol of the drabness that Paul longs to escape.

For Paul, the contrast between his home and his “fairy world” is as much aesthetic and sensory as social and class-based. He longs to escape the normalcy of his neighborhood and the life that transpires there.

While readers have seen Paul successfully put on an act in front of his teachers, here it becomes clear that he can find such performances exhausting—and he’ll go to extreme lengths just to avoid having to interact with his father, with whom he feels unable to communicate. The tension of his relationship with his father is evident in this fantasy about his father nearly killing him.

Again, a set of well-chosen details serve to paint a pretty damning portrait of the Cordelia Street milieu as seen through Paul’s eyes—one characterized by petty material interests and stunted, uninspiring dreams and desires. 

The clerk represents the life awaiting Paul if he follows his father’s desires and embraces the norms and values of Pittsburgh and Cordelia Street. He speaks of the clerk and his wife with disdain.

Although Paul cannot stand the vision of bourgeois family life that the clerk represents, he does manage to wrest some idealized images of life beyond Pittsburgh from the otherwise banal conversation.

Paul’s father represents a certain view of the American Dream as something which is attainable through hard work, reasonable ambition, and an emphasis on the bottom line—a pragmatism that Paul finds appallingly dreary.

The hidden violet water is yet another detail of Paul’s dandyism that clues readers into his homosexuality. Though these details may seem to a modern reader to play into simplistic stereotypes of gay men, it’s worth keeping in mind that the story was written in 1905, when such stereotypes were not quite so familiar in the public imagination. Another such clue emerges with the character of Charley Edwards, who recognizes in Paul a “vocation”—a subtle innuendo implying that both young men are gay. The story is littered with such subtle clues.

The calls attention to the irony that Paul understands his “real life” to transpire in theatres—a place where fictions are staged. Yet the narrator is also deeply sympathetic to Paul’s embrace of the artificial as a necessary refuge for him, since he feels unable to be himself in a world that rejects homosexuality.

Again, the story points to the idealism of Paul’s view of the world of the theatre. There is a vast discrepancy between how Paul views the theater and the banal reality of the workers on stage.

Paul weaves elaborate fictions for his classmates as a way of trying to play his difference from them—which is painfully obvious to all—to his advantage. His lies are not particularly convincing, so more than demonstrating Paul’s superiority they seem to demonstrate his insecurity and his compulsive need to perform. Paul’s exaggerated and constant performativity perhaps extends from a feeling that, because he cannot be himself, he must always relate to the outside world as though he is “in character”—because others see him already as a character.

This abrupt transition underlines the limits of Paul’s ability to fashion a different life for himself just by imagining it. “Real life” intrudes in the form of authority figures forcing Paul to get a job.

This section concludes with the implication that Paul’s dreams are unrealistic in part because even art relies on money—and that there’s no escaping from the difficult realities of everyday life.