Paul's Case

The story “Paul’s case: a study in temperament” involves a young boy named Paul and his struggle to becoming happy with the life he lives. Paul is very different from the people in his town. Most people in his town such as his teachers or father may think of him as a rebel but really he is just unhappy with the life he is living. The one thing that brings him to term with his life is music. He feels as if he is locked in a cage and needs to be set free. Paul’s strangeness, his desire for the purple and for theatricality, does strike me as being a coded way of identifying him as gay.

            The story was written back in 1905 so I don’t think they were very open about men and women being homosexual, so I feel like most of the story was coded and there is a lot of inferring that needs to be done. Paul continuously refers to thing as being gay or fagged. A lot of the thing he called gay were unnecessary such as “The men on my block sat on gay cushions placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk”. I feel like he did not have to add the word gay in that statement. Many homosexuals don’t want to admit of them being different in this way so they get angry at it or try and make fun of it when really this is their way of trying to accept it. I personally have a cousin who is homosexual and all while we were younger he would make fun of other people or just act really mean towards homosexuals. He was trying to hate it so that maybe he wouldn’t turn out that way but as we know now that didn’t work because you just can’t change who you really are and I feel like this is what Paul was doing.

            They also mention how while Paul was in New York he meets a wild San Francisco boy, at freshmen at Yale. They explain how the young man offers to show Paul the night side of the town, and after that they went out to dinner not returning to the hotel till seven o’ clock the next morning.  There are many things that seem fishy about that. To me it sounds like Paul went on a date. No teenage boy wants to spend a whole night out with another male eating dinner, drinking Champaign and exploring the town. At that time in life teenage boys look at many things as being gay so because they are not fully mature yet they would stay away from situations like that. It says they didn’t return to the hotel till the next morning. I feel like there is no way they were outside that long just walking and exploring the town. It doesn’t say specifically what they did but I just inferred that they stayed out somewhere else and may have been sexually active with each other.

            Paul was very unhappy with the life he lived the only thing he enjoyed back at home was listening to the orchestra. He didn’t have much money, he got in trouble in school, he didn’t have many friends, and he felt like his father could not relate to him. He got so unhappy with his life to the point where one day after coming home from his ushering job he just crept into his house cold and wet and stayed in the dirty basement the whole night. He sat there having horrible thoughts thinking about ways his father may mistake him as a bugler and kill him, and he seemed okay with that. This is not normal I feel like Paul was suffering from depression. He was living in a world where he felt alone and different, but different in a bad way that he felt no one could accept or understand.

            Paul said that the time he spent in New York was the best time of his life. He got to live out his dream of feeling high class getting to listen to the orchestra eating fine food and drinking fine wine and I felt like he also got to be himself with the boy he meet there. When Paul finally got a taste of the good life he felt like going back to his old life would be worst than death itself. As time went on his father eventually found out that he snuck away and took all his money spending it in New York living a life he knew he could not afford. So people began to look for Paul. At this point Paul just couldn’t take it anymore he couldn’t go back to being that unhappy depressed young man he used to be so he decided to kill himself. He may have done this for many reasons. I feel like he did this because he knew he could not be accepted as a homosexual and because he knew he could not afford the life he wanted to live. If he went back to his home town he would have to work doing something he didn’t want to do because he got kicked out of school. Paul felt like there is no point in living this life if you can’t live it the way you want so killing himself was the best decision for him. He finally got set free and was able to move on to a place where he could be himself.