Paul's Case, By Willa Cather

“Paul’s Case” written by Willa Cather, talks about a man struggling with his personality traits believing that he knows where he belongs, but his teachers and family members refuse to support his beliefs. Paul has a hard time with both interior and exterior problems, causing him to be a quite confusing character. From the standpoint of his teachers and family members, Paul seems irregular. From his perspective, however, he seems to misunderstand why they think such of him which will take him into profound actions and thinking. Furthermore, the second short story, “A Curtain of Greens” written by Edora Welty, narrates about a womanly setting of a flower garden where it is mostly used to explore the relationship between fertility and death, between …show more content…
For him, the rest of his life was but "a sleep and a forgetting." (Cather 407) The minute Paul steps into these buildings, he automatically felt at home and in his “habitat.” Another example of proving this point is from the statement "he breathed like a prisoner set free" (Cather 409). Paul's life was so repetitive and boring in similarity to his theater life, which he believed was his "secret temple." (Cather 406) He truly believes that he belongs to the arts. This makes “Paul's case” very sad because no one believed and respected him. This is a good reason why he escaped to New York to be in a place where he would be accepted for himself. A similar case is in “A Curtain of greens”, Mrs. Larkin hides herself in her garden, and the only townspeople who are mentioned are her neighbors who sit in the windows of their homes patiently waiting for the rain to come and watching her. In the lowest point of Mrs. Larkin’s pain, she takes gardening very seriously, becoming “over-vigorous, disreputable, and heedless" (Welty 620) in the eyes of her neighbors. Mrs. Larkin states that she searches not Chestina's "well designed garden plot," but searches "to allow an over-flowering” (Welty 619). Later on, she figures out that the garden not only gives support but captivation in an unfriendly force. As Mrs. Larkin works in her aged pair of men’s overalls to work on her rebellious plants, her …show more content…
He is a character with dreams and hopes just like many individuals. The fact that Paul actually traveled to New York to fulfill his dreams shows that he is a dedicated character. He didn’t want to return to Cordelia Street and for him, home was "worse than jail," (Cather 409) and the thought of it was "sickeningly vivid."(Cather 411) This shows just how sad he was at home, which is very sad. When Paul commits suicide, his death was foreshadowed when he "sat staring at the revolver." (Cather 413) However, when he decided that "that was not the way," (Cather 412) a false sense of hope was installed in the reader. Hope that he would return home and make things right. This hope came to an abrupt end, as did Paul's life, when he threw himself in front of a speeding locomotive. To compare, Mrs. Larkin raises her hoe above Jamey and kills him. Jamey is a young black individual that often came to watch her work on her garden and give her a hand. As time goes on, the rain starts to fall, her rage and misery start to wear off and faints in the flowers realizing that she seems caught up in a joking, blameless and stunning vision. She willingly wants to go through and contribute in the secrecy of nature, which has killed her spouse and ruined both her faith in the power of love and her capability to contribute of visions like Jamey's. At the end of the day, she tosses out the hoe she used as a “weapon” and forgets the world