Paul's case

Plot summary

When Paul meets with the principal and his teachers from Pittsburgh High School after he has been suspended for a week, they complain about his agitation in class, and about his apparent repulsion of other people's bodies. He then goes to work at the Pittsburgh Carnegie Hall but he is early, so he just tarries in the picture gallery. He then proceeds to usher in the audience. After the concert he follows some of the singers and marvels at their glamor. He then walks back to his house but decides to sneak into the basement. Being so late in coming home, he fears that his father will think him an intruder and possibly try to kill him.

Paul despises the "burghers" on his respectable but drab street, and is unimpressed by a plodding young man who works for an iron company and is married with four children, although his father would like to use him as a role model for his son. However, while Paul longs to be wealthy, cultivated and powerful, he lacks the stamina and ambition to even attempt to change his condition. Instead, Paul escapes his humdrum life through visiting Charley Edwards, a young actor, and works as an usher at Carnegie Hall. Sometime later, as Paul makes it clear to one of his teachers that his job there is more important than his lessons, his father prevents him from continuing to work there.

Later, Paul takes a train to New York City. He now works for Denny & Carson's and has stolen a thousand dollars for his trip. He buys an expensive wardrobe, checks in at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, walks around the city, and meets a young San Franciscan who shows him around the nightlife until morning. His few days of impersonating a rich, privileged young man bring him more contentment than he has ever known before. On the eighth day, however, when most of the money has been spent, Paul reads in the Pittsburgh newspapers that the theft has been made public, and that his father has returned the money and is now on his way to New York City to fetch his son. Unable to face a return to his dull, middle class life, Paul kills himself by jumping in front of a train.

Characters

Paul:the eponymous protagonist. He is tall and thin, something of a dandy. He was born in Colorado and his mother died a few months later. He is bored by school, but passionate about music, especially the opera. He hates his middle-class life and longs for luxury.

Paul's father:kindly and respectable but with little understanding of or sympathy for Paul's restlessness with his life

The Principal:of Pittsburgh High School

The English teacher: a well-meaning woman whom Paul disdains

The Drawing master

The guard:in the picture gallery of the Carnegie Hall

The soloist:in the opera at Carnegie Hall

Paul's sisters:whose mundane interests further alienate him

A young man:whom Paul's father wants Paul to model after, but who embodies the middle-class life that Paul hates.

Charlie Edwards:Paul's friend who works as an actor

The college boy:who spends a night with Paul in New York

Willa Sibert Cather was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Virginia and Nebraska, and graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence in New Brunswick, Canada.