Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" (1905)

Discussion Questions

1.) Describe Paul's personality as Cather sets it forth in the open paragraph of the story. Is this someone we like and admire?

2.) Why do Paul's teachers have so much difficulty dealing with him? What does the knowledge that Cather was a teacher in Pittsburgh at the time she wrote this story suggest about her perspective on Paul's case?

3.) What techniques does Cather use to establish the reader's sympathy for Paul? What limits that sympathy?

4.) Contrast the three worlds -- school, Carnegie Hall, and Cordelia Street -- in which Paul moves. Why does Cather introduce them in that order?

5.) What is the effect of Cather's capitalizing the word Romance?

6.) Discuss the three decorations that hang above Paul's bed. What aspects of American culture do they refer to? What do they leave out?

7.) Explore the allusion embedded in the name "Cordelia Street." (Cordelia is the name of King Lear's faithful daughter.) Why does Paul feel he is drowning there?

8.) Discuss Paul's fear of rats. Why does he feel that he has "thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner" when he steals the money and leaves for New York?

9.) Explicate the paragraph that begins "Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness." To what extent does this paragraph offer a key to the story's structure and theme?

10.) Describe the effect of the leap forward in time that occurs in the white space before we find Paul on the train to New York. Why does Cather withhold for so long her account of what has taken place?

11.) What is admirable about Paul's entry into and sojourn in New York? What is missing from his new life?

12.) Why does Paul wink at himself in the mirror after reading the newspaper account of his deeds?

13.) On the morning of his suicide, Paul recognizes that "money was everything." Why does he think so? Does the story bear him out?

14.) What is the effect of Paul's burying his carnation in the snow? of his last thoughts?

15.) Analyze the story as an attack on American society.

16.) Cather's story is punctuated by several recurrent images and turns of phrase. Locate as many as you can and take note of their contexts. What does this network of internal connections reveal?