Paul's Case by Willa Cather

Like the steel it manufactures, Pittsburgh's cold dullness bores a burning young boy compared to the storybook extravagance of New York. Willa Cather's story, Paul's Case tells this tale of the two cities encasing his life, and how he chose death over life in Pittsburgh.

This is Paul's case and it is relatable if you have ever yearned for more than day-to-day existence. On the monotony of Cordelia Street, Paul lives in a working class town where everyone was raised with a Sunday school mentality. To Paul, life in his house on Cordelia Street is "a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of everyday existence". Bland colors like the horrible yellow wallpaper in his room along with the old fashioned ideology embedded in the town dampen Paul's spirits from blossoming in the more extravagant world he wishes to live in.

Paul gets a taste of the world he desires through his job as usher at Carnegie Hall. "It was at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting." Cather writes of Paul's only sanctuary in the smoke-palled city of Pittsburgh. Paul constantly boasts about his status in the theatre, often bending the truth and in an ironic twist of fate these tall tales get Paul taken out of school and put to work. This could not hold Paul back from his passionate desire to be different and it even opened a window of opportunity for Paul to lay his own red carpet to New York City.

He enters New York blindly and in the whiteout of the snow-covered streets he sees purity and a new beginning. He pampers himself in the finest New York has to offer and finds a moment in time to call his own. The city is a "bewildering medley of color," for Paul as Cather puts it. Nothing can stop him now and life is finally worth living. Ultimately his theft is uncovered and his father sets out to retrieve him. With this his depression returns and "all the world had become Cordelia Street". It was New York or nothing; life as he wanted it or death.

In his final moments Paul ponders the red carnation that symbolized him throughout the story. Just as the carnation's red color symbolized the loud defiance Paul had with his teachers in the beginning "he noticed their red glory all over". Paul realized that just as he had, a flower blossoms and is beautiful for a short time, only to wither away. Paul refused to wither away and chose to enjoy his time and cut it short. For Paul it was better to have lived divinely for a moment in New York, than to have depressed his existence in Pittsburgh.