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Now and then character analysis
Now and then character analysis
Now and then character analysis
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Paul's Case by Willa Cather shows the world through the eyes of Paul, a boy's who's naive view of a good life leads to a tragic fate. Throughout the story, the reader is shown the life of Paul a snobby kid who believes he is above everyone else. Readers are shown his views of life and given quite a bit of information about Paul's character. By giving details about Pauls character through his thoughts, actions, words, and others' thoughts about him, readers are able to have an in depth view of his character and understand why he ultimately decides to take his own life. From the outset of the story, the reader is shown Paul's thoughts. Through this the story tells us that Paul has a very active imagination. This is shown when Pauls says, "Then, …show more content…
Around the end of the story, Paul decides to run off to New York for a week to finally live his dreams. However, by making his dreams a reality he exposes himself to something he wasn't prepared for, the truth. At first, everything is all Paul ever wanted it be. He is able to finally live life as he sees fit. He spends his money without care, and is able to live up to all his lies. (Although this reaches its climax when Paul meets a young man in the street), "The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o'clock the next morning" (Cather 11). After this, Paul's fake reality falls apart quickly. Faced with the reality that he will have to return home, Paul decides to take his own life. Instead of ending it quickly with a gun, he decides to go a different route, "When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands. He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black,
Paul’s character relates to the central idea because he is an example of a person who was not accepted by others and fell down on a dark path of no
Paul does feel guild of abandoning his mother but handles it by running away, opposed to Dunny who is trying to pay off his guilt or not by forgetting it even happened like Boy. To accomplish this, he lives as a new person and takes on the persona of this great and mysterious magician.
The stories "Barn Burning" written by William Faulkner and "Paul's Case" written by Willa Cather both have two separate characters with very similar troubles. Each has a uniquely sad narrative. "Barn Burning" is a sad story because it not only shows the classical struggle between the underprivileged and the privileged classes, but also the struggle between a father and his son, Sarty. Together, these two boys share comparable lifestyles. Each has conflicts with his father, fantasize of a wealthier existence, and flee from the tribulations in his life.
That had happened because of a traumatizing experience when he was in kindergarten. His brother, Erik, and Erik's friend, Vincent, had sprayed Paul's eyes with white paint. (Pg. 264) Before Paul had remembered that incident, Paul had always thought he was foolish. On page 35 it explains why he thought he was irrelevant. It says "I was the boy who had not listened and who was now paying the price." That shows that Paul had always thought low of himself because his parents never told him the truth. This decision made Paul feel weak and miserable because he had always thought it was his fault. On page 265 Paul gets his parents to admit what had actually happened to make him blind. They said they didn't tell him the truth because they didn't want him to hate his brother. What Paul mentions was quite sad. He said,"So you figured it would be better if I just hated myself". (265) In that scene, his mom and dad both broke down crying. All along, Paul had felt guilt in himself for something he hadn't done.
... While the corpse represents each of these concepts, in the end it is Paul’s faith – his own luck – that saves his life once again. What, upon first glance, appears to be a hectic and confused account of a destructive shelling becomes a wonderfully connected verse of one soldier’s struggle to preserve himself against all odds. What more can be said about Paul?
Every encounter Paul has with someone he creates a new identity to bond and connect with them. Throughout the play Paul creates multiple personas for himself, he realizes that he is an empty vessel with no past and only memories of what he has done during his different personas. Paul loses control over his multiple personas which cause them to overlap with each other. Which causes him to feel lost and in search of help, when Ousia offers this help he gladly takes it which end up putting him in prison and never to be seen in New York.
Paul surrounds himself with the aesthetics of music and the rich and wealthy, as a means to escape his true reality. In Paul’s true reality, he has a lack of interest in school. His disinterest in school stems from the alienation and isolation he has in life. This disinterest in school reflects Paul’s alienation because of the unusual attention he receives there that he doesn’t get at home. In class one day he was at the chalkboard and “his English teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand” (Cather 1).
In "Paul's Case," the story revolves around a young male. He is the main character. There are very few mentions of women, however, when they do come into the story they are only mentioned briefly, or they play minor, secondary characters. Paul's mother and sisters are spoken about once during the entire story, while there are four references to his father. The females in his family are mentioned only in passing and remain flat characters, while his father is referred to several times, each time involving an action or comment which exhibits an aspect of his father's personality which makes him a more rounded character.
Ditsky, John. “Cather: Overview.” Reference Guide to Short Fiction. Ed. Noelle Watson. Detroit: St. James
Paul believes that everyone around him is beneath him. He is convinced that he is superior to everyone else in his school and in his neighborhood. He is even condescending to his teachers, and shows an appalling amount of contempt for them, of which they are very aware.
In his first year of school, he is only interested in Megan Murray, the first girl Paul has ever lusted for. However in his second year, he meets Rosie. Rosie watches him practise in the Music Room during lunch. Initially, Paul feels intimidated by Rosie as he thinks that she is too much like himself. He is afraid that he now has competition as she is the other smart kid in the class, yet he still chooses to teach her some piano. Choosing to spring lines from Herr Keller’s teachings, he makes himself sound smarter and more accomplished at the piano than he actually is. The characters show the development of Paul through the way they act with Paul and the language and content used in conversation. This enables us to see Paul’s “plumage” being presented to the world as Paul develops through time to become the swan that he is at the end of the novel.
Paul cannot face the reality that his family must relocate in order to live, despite the fact that he has been faced with the same outcome day after day. Although Ellen constantly pleads for change, Paul cannot shake the illusion he is presented with, and proves that hope can be a dangerous mechanism for keeping one distant from reality. Additionally, the lamp at noon represents the fact that the land is slowly eroding away and that there is an extreme amount of dust in the air, causing it to be difficult to see during the middle of the day. Like the environment, Paul is blindly chasing his dream and is unable to see the reality in front of him. His wishes to be with the land strongly oppose those of Ellen’s, who wants to move away from the reality she is faced with. Ellen’s chronic unhappiness demonstrates that Paul’s devoted hope for the land to miraculously be fertile again and his blindness towards his barren reality has caused him to disregard her feelings. Paul’s pride in being a farmer leads to the tragedy of his child’s
...l’s legs and forearms, and the river’s rapids colliding with rocks. The viewer is shown that this is a battle between two giants; two entities that Norman has, and will, never fully understand. In the end, Paul is swept underwater, and reappears in a calm part of the river, holding the fish high in celebration. The river is tamed, and Paul is finally victorious in his rebellion. This is the final scene of Paul in the film, and he dies in a bar fight of which the details are not fully disclosed.
In the beginning of the story, Paul seems to be a typical teenage boy: in trouble for causing problems in the classroom. As the story progresses, the reader can infer that Paul is rather withdrawn. He would rather live in his fantasy world than face reality. Paul dreaded returning home after the Carnegie Hall performances. He loathed his "ugly sleeping chamber with the yellow walls," but most of all, he feared his father. This is the first sign that he has a troubled homelife. Next, the reader learns that Paul has no mother, and that his father holds a neighbor boy up to Paul as "a model" . The lack of affection that Paul received at home caused him to look elsewhere for the attention that he craved.
The conflict of this story is shown with Paul trying to deal with his father’s death in the Portrait of an Invisible Man, and his divorce in The Book of Memory. As Paul received the sudden news of his father’s death, he was taken back by the fact he actually passed away. Paul then made the trip with his wife to clear out his father’s possessions from the house, so they could pu...